ClickEquations Blog

A few years ago when asked for the #1 tip to improve a campaign, I wrote that segregating brand keywords was the task that I thought nearly everyone should do, many haven’t done yet, and can offer huge benefits in any campaign.

As covered in the discussion of Secret Truth #3 and #4, when the keywords within an ad group or campaign have inconsistent business goals or performance profiles, the quality of your results suffer.

There are probably no keywords in your account that have as distinct business goals or performance profiles as brand keywords – which is why they really need to be isolated.

Should You Bid On Your Brand?

The wisdom or necessity of buying paid search on your brand keywords – where you should rank #1 (or at least) very high in the organic results, is often discussed. In the end, most decide that buying the paid search coverage is a good idea, even if you have multiple prominent organic links.

We agree that bidding on your core brand names and terms is worthwhile.

There are several reasons for this:

• If you don’t buy those links someone else will
• Many report a ‘brand halo’ effect in which the paid listings actually increase organic traffic
• There are people who click paid links over organic ones, for various reasons
• You’ve already spent a lot of money to build the reputation that generated the branded search. Paying a few cents for the ‘last mile’ of the click to actually get the visit is a prudent investment.
• It’s great to see huge CTR and conversion rates in your PPC account
• The huge CTR of your brand terms actually drives your account CTR history up, helping overall quality score

Types of Brand Keywords

The diversity of brand keywords can be surprising. But to really ‘answer the question’ (Secret Truth #1) it’s critical to figure out all the different ways your brand is being used by carefully examining your search queries (Secret Truth #2).

We typically see several types of brand keywords:

• Brand Pure Keywords
• Navigational Brand Keywords
• Brand Related Keywords
• Brand Plus Keywords

What we call ‘pure’ brand keywords are the most narrow and focused set. This includes the brand word or words themselves, mis-spelling and deviations, and not much else. These we isolate into their own ad group or even campaign.

The next set, and often largest by keyword count, are navigational keywords. The searcher is trying to find your company or even your website. Navigational keywords include ‘brand website’, ‘brand homepage’, ‘brand company’, ‘brand city-name’ and the all important ‘www.brand.com’ (yes, people google that) plus many others. All of these clearly navigational terms should be bundled into their own ad group.

Then come the brand related keywords. These include things like executive names, other terms and other phrases that may be connected with the brand. A lot of these will be developed as you query-mine the results you get from your initial broad match pure brand keywords.

Your business may have and need other clusters of brand keywords too. A business with a lot of retail locations would likely have a whole ad group full of ‘location and store locater’ words and phrases. There may need to be groups for your PR issues, your financial/investor issues, etc. Create as many as you need, and follow the ideas for campaign and ad group organization discussed in Secret Truths #3 and #4.

Brand Plus Keywords

The final set are those we call brand plus keywords. These include your brand plus category, product, or other keywords. These are the ones that are often mixed in with other non-brand keywords and that we’re most strongly recommending you separate out of your typical existing campaigns and ad groups.

Here’s the problem. Suppose you sell dog collars of your own making, and right now your dog collar ad group has the following keywords:

• dog collars
• puppy collars
• collars for dogs
• hemp dog collars
• MyBrand dog collars

Of course this is an over-simplified example and there would be many more keywords and perhaps spead over several ad groups. But the point is that if ‘MyBrand’ is the house brand item, that keyword should be put into it’s own ad group and we would strongly recommend moving it into the main brand keywords campaign, or more likely a separate brand-plus campaign.

The rational is the same as we’ve discussed for both campaign and ad group organization; the alignment between query and text ad is best served by a very specific kind of ad, and the numbers these brand-plus keywords produce will only confuse the performance and results when mixed with non brand keywords.

Obviously if you have tons of brands and categories, doing the separation can be a lot of work. As always, prioritize based on volume – get those brand-plus keywords that are attracting a lot of traffic moved into their own ad groups and if possible campaigns first. Finish the rest progressively over time.

Brands as Negative Keywords

When you’ve created nice brand focused campaigns and ad groups, your search query reports should show that the majority of queries the contain your brand keywords are matched to those ad groups. But there will be exceptions.

Every time a branded search query lands in one of your non-brand ad groups, take a look and see if you have a keywords that was targetted at that search query. If you don’t, add one.

Of course, if it’s a search query you don’t want, add it as a negative keyword to both the brand and non-brand campaign.

After query-mining for brand keywords in your non-brand account for a while (days to weeks, depending on your volume), when you’re confident that the keywords you’ve added to your brand focused campaigns are relatively complete and accurate, go ahead and add your brand keyword as a campaign negative to the non-branded campaigns.

This will assure that no branded queries are matched into those campaigns. They’ll be forced (more or less) to match into the brand focused campaigns you’ve created for that purpose. The users will see brand appropriate ads, they’ll be sent to brand appropriate landing pages, and your campaign and ad groups reports for both branded and non branded keywords will be more complete, consistent, actionable, and accurate.

What Do You Think?

This blog post is part of a series extending and amplifying the ideas in our free ebook ’21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC’.

What they’re saying: “Craig’s dug deep into AdWords and unearthed some important nuggets. They’re surprising, simply but eloquently described, and vital to your PPC advertising success.” – David Szetela – Owner and CEO, Clix Marketing’.

Download Your Copy Today
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Anyone who has managed a serious paid search campaign knows the work isn’t easy.

Eighteen months ago in a series of posts on this blog, I discussed some of the reasons why that’s true, namely a lack of clarity surrounding the data, difficulty in prioritizing opportunities and risks, and generally inefficient tools.

Not surprisingly, these issues have greatly influenced the capabilities we’ve been adding to the ClickEquations paid search platform.

This week we’re releasing a ClickEquations V2 which takes a giant step towards addressing the issue of prioritization.

What Should You Do Today?

Paid search provides, as our friend Avinash has called it, “more data than God intended us to have.” We manage huge campaigns in changing business and competitive environments, and generate hundreds of thousands or millions of pieces of data every day. And there are dozens of variables that control the thousands upon thousands of keywords in our accounts.

So every day when you log into your accounts, your have to play detective. You have to sort through all the new data, to discover what is going on, and try to determine why. Of course, you’re not looking for just one thing, but have to keep in mind dozens or even hundreds of issues that could be ‘wrong’ in your account at that particular moment.

The reports aren’t going to tell you that anything is wrong. It’s up to you to notice that something is wrong, or could be improved.

Then you have to turn into a Doctor. You have to diagnose the problem and choose the correct remedy. The symptoms may not be clear and some of the alternatives may be risky.

And finally you must become the technician, implementating the prescribed solution – which could be as easy as a button click or a complex procedure with many steps and perhaps a lot of repetition.
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Sounds Like A Job For Software

Until now, paid search software really didn’t help with this problem. It collected data, presented it to you, and enabled you to make changes.

Everything in the middle – identifying, diagnosing, prescribing – was left up to you.

This has been a huge challenge. It’s hard to spot every problem ever time it appears. It’s hard to always know what to do. And sometimes when you know what to do it’s hard to implement it.

Shouldn’t your software help?

Best Practices in ClickEquations

The new automated best practices in ClickEquations tackle this problem. Now instead of conducting daily searches for every possible issue you might to prevent, or each opportunity you may wish to exploit, the software will do it for you.

You specify the conditions you want to watch out for – choosing from a list of ready-to-use best practices. ClickEquations will then monitor your account and point out, for every campaign, ad group, keyword, and text ad, every best practice violation as soon as it occurs.

You can then drill down on just the elements that need your attention with just a click. To help you understand just what the risk or opportunity is, and the types of solutions that are most likely to be appropriate, another click provides detailed descriptions and a list of recommended potential solutions or actions.

And finally (although this really isn’t a part of the best practices feature) we’ve made it much easier and more efficient to execute the kind of changes that correct at least some of these issues.

A New Relationship With Your Paid Search Software

The overall effect of our best practices feature is amazing. Now as you browse your account, you get pro-active suggestions for ways to improve your results.

When you log in each day, there is a suggested work list waiting for you. And when you polish those off you feel confident that your account is on the right track at least in terms of a pretty wide set of important issues.

There will still be much work left to do, but now you can spend your time and brain power on more advanced issues, creative solutions, and issues truly unique and strategic to your individual account.

A Journey Of A Thousand Paces

The best practices features in the ClickEquations V2 release define the direction for the next generation of paid search software. It’s time for software to not just enable paid search management, but actually add value and help us to intelligently and efficiently deliver great results.

The capabilities we’ve delivered are just the start of our vision for this type of paid search software. We’re calling it ClickEquations Adviser, and the capabilities we’ve just released will continue to expand and evolve.

Looking at the three issues described in those old blog posts, we think we’ve made some good progress:

• Clarity – The first releases of ClickEquations focused on delivering best-in-class data and reporting, and we believe that the issues of clarity are largely resolved.
• Priority – The new best practices features and new one-click segmentation capabilities (also included in this release) is a huge step towards making prioritization far easier than ever before.
• Efficiency – We’ve put in some great efficiency features – bulk and mass editing for example, but still think that a lot more can be in this area. Watch for some innovations in this area in future releases.

There is undoubtedly a lot more work to do. But paid search management is easier and more effective than it was just a year ago. The new release of ClickEquations is another important improvement. We think you’ll agree.

See For Yourself

We’ll be showing off our new features at SMX in Santa Clara this week, at OMMA in San Francisco in two weeks, and in New York at SES at the end of the month. Please join us if you can at one of these venues, or sign up for one of our weekly webinars to get a complete demonstration of ClickEquations.

We’ve written about the AdWords impression share metrics often in the past on this blog.

So rather than re-hashing or re-writing, we’ll suggest you go read our Impression Share Series to extend and amplify the comments made in the fifth Secret Truth.

Finished?

There isn’t much more to add. The one point worth clarifying or reiterating, is that Impression Share is worth reorganizing for. We talked about several rationals for creating focused campaign organization in the Secret Truth #4 post, and hinted at the Impression Share relationship.

Because Impression Share is reported only at the campaign level, it is always an average. Looking at the number for campaigns that contain keywords and ad groups with highly disparate performance, clarity of target, match type distribution, and other characteristics makes it a worthless and probably misleading number. In order to trust Impression Share, your campaign organization must be focused and internally consistent.

Maybe one day Google will share with us Impression Share at the ad group or even the keyword level. Wouldn’t that be grand?

Until then, to get the most out of impression share it the first trick is to monitor it closely, and the second is to make sure your campaigns are well organized. Actually all of the ideas presented in Secret Truths 2-8 and 14 can help you get the most from this great metric.

What Do You Think?

This blog post is part of a series extending and amplifying the ideas in our free ebook ’21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC’.

What they’re saying on twitter: “Very, Very, Very nice e-book from @clickequations called ‘21 secrets to PPC’. Easy to read, and full of good and funny stuff! – @Eloi_Casali”

Download Your Copy Today
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