To Brand Or Not To Brand?

Should You Bid on Brand Keywords in Google Ads? 

In this episode of the Google Ads Unleashed Podcast, host Jeremy dives into the classic debate: to brand or not to brand? 

Learn when running a branded search campaign makes sense, when it’s just burning cash, and how to test whether it’s actually driving incremental revenue. If you’ve ever wondered whether bidding on your own brand name is a must, this episode is for you!

Get your free 30 minute strategy session with Jeremy here: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/

Scale your store with 1:1 coaching: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/1-2-1-coaching

Transcript

Hello and welcome back to Google Ads unleashed, guys. I hope you're having a fabulous, fabulous Monday. So today I want to be talking about something that recently came up in a client audit, and I want to share this with you. And it's the age old question, to brand or not to brand so today I'm going to specifically talk about brand search. Because if you do have a brand shopping campaign, which you know if you have doing your job properly, or if you don't want to be pissing away money against into Google's own pockets, then you should be separating your branded shopping traffic out into a separate campaign, the separate bid strategy, but that's not the one I'm talking about today, because traditionally, this one brand shopping is something that I would pretty much always have on just for the Simple reason that Google will very often match other listings on your branded searches, and it's just a good idea to flood the SERP with your own listings when it comes to branded shopping. So traditionally, that's not some something I really doubt, or where I would sort of take budget away, or a campaign, I would pause. However, today I want to be talking about, when does it make sense to brand, and when does it not make sense to brand? And for me, the there is basically one very good reason or two very good reasons. So traditionally, let's have a talk about, first what brand campaigns are good for, and in my opinion, they are good for a couple of reasons. So for instance, to show different messaging to your organic traffic. Let's say you have a sale on right then you can actually do different kind of messaging on your branded search. Or let's say you have a different offer for instance, that's something that I told 81 when they were a client of ours, were to build a different offer page. So the organic page goes to the home page, and their actual branded search ad goes straight to an offer page. So they it, it kind of makes sense. That is scenario one. Scenario two, where it makes sense is that there are competitors who are bidding on your brand. So that means, for instance, sometimes even not deliberately, right? So they might be running a p max, and p max will just match the Search element on branded searches on comparable brands. So they totally makes sense, because you don't want them to really take away any ad real estate that being said, branded search ads or, sorry, competitor search ads traditionally work really poorly, unless you've got a few tricks up your sleeve. I've done an episode on that, if you want to go back on here and listen to that. But yeah, that is probably one of the instances where I would run a brand search. And lastly, I would always run a brand search at the beginning of a project. Okay? Because when Google actually doesn't have any data, and you do have other campaigns running on matter, on Tiktok or whatever, and there's some brand awareness, there will be a lot of people searching directly for your brand, and people who click those ads relatively and comparatively cheaply will convert and feed your the algorithm with really important data about your ideal customer profile. Right? You can layer audiences over your brand search, you can to then gather data, which you can then use as base audiences, a P, Max, you can train the algorithm up and get enough conversion volume through there so that you can use automated bidding strategies. There's a lot of lot of positive things that you can do with branded traffic, again, if you have even specific landing page, oftentimes, I've done an episode on that, on the perfect brand search campaign, there might be a lot of search volume for, for instance, discount code or experiences, stuff like that. So you want to be building different landing pages and and send branded traffic there with in different ad groups? Yeah, those are all the instances you should run brand. But now is the question, do you always have to run brands? So although it is the default in our agency, and that we do do that, the question is, do you really have to? And with this one audit that we've done, we had seen that the client at this stage didn't really have a particular new customer offer that wasn't communicated on the homepage anyway, right? The homepage itself was pretty much like a new customer offer anyway. Was the homepage itself was like a landing page. Okay? So they had a fantastic, organic listing. They didn't have. Of any competitors bidding on their brand, right? No one was bidding on it. They were no there was no traffic, nothing in the auction. Insights, in the last 30 days, their CPCs were like one or two pence, right? Super, super, super cheap, because no one else was bidding on it. And now they were the stage where we grew, where they had grown. They're not like non branded traffic to such a degree that there was enough conversion volume for the ad account to just carry itself with non branded search volume. Okay, so at this stage, it really begs the question, are we just paying through the nose for non branded traffic, for branded traffic, and it doesn't actually add any incremental value to the bottom line. So we had this instance, for instance, with one of our clients last year, where for a long time we had, for some reason, the branded search run on max conversions, and it was doing really well. Then we had switched in August to target impression share, obviously, as you should, I don't know why it wasn't done before. So sometimes even we make mistakes. And we had saved a considerable amount of money, a few 1000 euros a month, on doing, you know, achieving the same outcome. And then into September, we decided, why don't we just turn brand search off completely? And that's what we did. And whilst conversion volume in the ad account fell, of course, naturally, we didn't see any difference in the bottom line of our client in triple whale, in the total figures in Shopify, nowhere, right? We turned it back on then in October, so no difference. Happening again for a week, and then we just let it off. Since then, unfortunately, this client's not with us anymore, because of a lot a lot of different reasons, they've actually returned this month, funny enough, in in a different shape, so they have come back to us, but so I don't really know the account history anymore, what happened after that, because they've come to us in a different capacity with a different project. So so that was just just a different project. But it goes to show that, yes, whilst the default is very, very good, that you should, you know, have certain structures in your ad account, and that you should bid on brand and so on, you should always really ask yourself, is it needed? What purpose does it serve? And is it just making Google money, or is it us making money? And that is what we do in our one to one coachings. That's what we teach in even our clients, right with with the agency. And, yeah, I just want to really encourage you to always think out the box and always think, What purpose does this serve, and does this bring my account forward? Hopefully this has been helpful. Go and have a look at your brand search. Is it incremental at all? Make a make a strategy, how you can actually test whether it brings additional revenue to the business or not. If you're unsure, then just drop me a text, uh. Jeremy Young Google ads, you'll find me on LinkedIn. You'll also find me on all of the common platforms, X, Instagram, Facebook. You'll also find us at young and digital dot marketing online, where you can book a one to one consultation with me for free, so I can see how I can help you with your Google ads. As always, this has been Jeremy Young, your personal Google Ads expert, and I wish you a happy and productive week ahead. You.