Search Marketing Sage

There have been multiple studies about the incremental lift in search traffic that Pay Per Click Advertising provides in recent years.  I’ve been quoting to clients the Google Study that said that search ads provide 89% incremental traffic.  The studies essentially say that when ads are shut off that the natural search results will only pick up for 11% of the lost traffic.

The study results, are almost in every case met with doubt and skepticism by the clients because the clients don’t trust that the information is valid because Google did the study. The issue is particularly doubted with regard to advertising on the companies name or brand names that they already rank number one for in natural search.

Our Test

We recently started a test for a retailer that had not previously utilized PPC advertising on its brand names before and monitored both the impact on natural search when those ads were turned on and the impact on PPC with the addition of the clicks on those specific brand keywords.

The results pretty much backed the premise of the Google study.  The study said:

Let’s face it: sometimes your branding strategy doesn’t always play well with your search marketing strategy. Your website copy, while true to your brand guidelines, doesn’t contain the keywords needed to drive traffic from search engines. Or perhaps you have a beautifully-designed website, created and coded using tools and programs on the bleeding edge of web design. But, Google can’t read it or index it into search results. Have any of these situations happened to you?

Thankfully, there are ways to resolve these challenges. Join us for a free webinar, Harmonizing Branding and Search to Achieve Optimal Results, on Thursday, January 24th at 2:00pm ET. During this webinar, Janet Driscoll Miller of Search Mojo and Pam Fitzgerald of branding and marketing services agency The Ivy Group will discuss ways you can integrate your branding and search strategies. You’ll learn:

• The basics of branding and how it’s more than just your logo.
• How to create messaging that utilizes your top search keywords while staying true to your brand.
• Best practices for designing a website that is aesthetically pleasing, user-friendly and search engine-friendly.
• How to make sure your brand is protected and represented positively in search engines.

UPDATE 2/7: Did you miss the webinar? Click here to watch Harmonizing Brand and Search to Achieve Optimal Results in its entirety! For a quick preview of the webinar, check out the video below:

Automotive OEM manufacturers are some of the biggest spenders in Pay Per Click Advertising. All automotive OEMs advertise on their own brand names – even though they already have number one natural results for their brand names. Some marketers are critical of advertising on brand terms that they already rank number one for, but the simple reality is that buying intent and conversions for both paid and natural clicks on these keywords are much higher, than when the natural or paid ads appear alone. It’s not a tactic to get more “traffic” it’s a tactic to get better converting traffic. There are several other reasons to bid on brand keywords, but that’s not what this post is about.

So obviously the number one keyword for driving the largest volume of desirable conversion actions on www.Toyota.com is the keyword “Toyota”. All Automotive OEMs need a balance of brand and non-branded automotive category terms to capture searchers in all parts of the buying cycle. But, the best volume of leads come from branded keywords. Performance on name of the Automotive OEM is the “bell-weather” roughly of how all those branded keywords should be doing. For example, traffic patterns on keywords like”Toyota dealers”, “Toyota cars” and “Toyota trucks” mirror the traffic trends on the word Toyota…

The losses and historic dips in sales this last October are reflected in search traffic on those same Automotive OEM brand names. Google’s Insights for Search tool allows anyone to index a keyword versus an entire category, in this case the entire automotive industry. The graphs tell the story we have seen play out on the news every day, demand for the brand keywords driving the greatest volume of leads for Automotive OEMs have dried up this fall and really bottomed out in October.