Are you running pay-per-click advertising campaigns and feel as though your brand traffic is draining your marketing budget? Whether you are managing the account in-house, or working with an external agency, this article will help inform your decision on how much to spend on branded traffic.
What is brand traffic?
Brand traffic refers to visitors who find your website by searching for your brand name, or related terms, into a search engine such as Google or Bing. This type of traffic is important for targeting audiences who are already familiar with your business, and are therefore more likely to make a purchase. Understanding and measuring your brand traffic with tools such as Google Ads search term reports can help you assess the amount of traffic you’re getting and how interested these users are in your product or service, allowing you to create campaigns that will make the most out of their intent. Targeting this traffic protects your audience from competitors bidding on your brand keywords. However, some argue you should exclude brand traffic, as you may have acquired the customer organically.
If you feel you are spending too much on branded traffic, it is possible to restructure your account and isolate this spend within a separate campaign. This allows you to make independent adjustments to the spend on brand terms without affecting other areas of your account.
Dedicated brand campaign
A strategy we often use in Google Ads to optimise brand traffic spend, is to isolate brand terms into a dedicated campaign. This allows for granular control over the budget allocated to these terms. This is hugely important as it allows you to understand the true campaign performance of your new customer campaigns without being diluted by brand traffic. By segregating brand traffic, you can gain clearer insights into its performance and your impression share for your brand terms. This is what we would set up for clients wanting to allocate spend to brand and has been an everlong strategy that we believe will continue into the future of Google Ads. One of the other benefits with this approach is that we are easily able to segment all brand traffic out during analysis, with a well structured campaign name like “Search | Brand”, we can exclude this traffic from our reporting. Based on the data accumulated from this structure, we are able to understand whether we need to reduce or reallocate spend within the account.
Negative keyword lists
Accompanied with a dedicated brand campaign, it’s crucial to exclude your brand terms from campaigns targeting new customers. Many times we have seen campaigns that, on the surface, seem to be performing extraordinary and then when we dig into the data we can see that the vast majority of the campaign performance can be dedicated to your own brand traffic. By implementing a negative keyword list, you ensure that your campaign budget is only focused on reaching new, potential customers. Implementing negative keyword lists for each cold traffic campaign and regularly updating them to account for new brand variations and misspellings is essential. It is important to note the impact that this may have on your shopping listing visibility. This is a huge change on your campaign performance and it is vital to make note of this change within the Google Ads interface, this is handy so we do not have to dig into the account change history to know why performance changed that day.
Bidding strategy
Those who have had interactions with Google know how much conversion based bidding is pushed, whether this be through the Google Support call, account recommendations or the sneaky auto-apply recommendations. Although conversion-based bidding for cold campaigns is our go-to strategy for most, if we have enough conversion data, this does not translate well to your brand campaigns. We have found that using conversion-based bidding for your brand campaigns results in an overspend in cost per click, resulting in lower traffic levels from your chosen spend. We would recommend only ever using one of 3 bidding strategies:
- Maximise clicks with a low Max. CPC
- Target impression share
- Manual CPC with a low CPC target
With any of these 3 strategies in place, we can limit how often the system can bid over the odds for users. This allows you to set appropriate limits on how much you can spend on your brand traffic. If you are struggling with your cost per click, check out our blog on how to get a lower CPC.
Auction Insights
To check your brand advert positioning and who is outranking you in the paid search results, Google Ads has several relevant metrics to monitor within “Auction Insights.“
“Impression share” is of primary consideration. This is the number of impressions your advert received divided by the number of impressions the ad was eligible for. You can make changes to your budget and bidding strategy, whilst monitoring the effect on this metric. A high impression share is great; however, you may be able to spend less and still achieve the same outcome. It also doesn’t account for the position of your ad in the auction.
Similarly with “outranking share” – this refers to how often your ad ranked higher than other advertisers in the search results. You could theoretically have a high impression share and low outranking share. This would mean your ad is consistently showing in the auction below your competitors.
Once you are aware of these metrics, you can adapt your bidding strategy to suit your goals. Do you need to increase impression share, or outrank a direct competitor who could be stealing your visitors? Maybe this requires a larger brand budget, or a higher cost per click bid strategy to achieve a more favourable position in the auction.
Conclusion
There are several reasons to separate brand traffic from your other campaigns. It helps to measure the value of new customers compared to existing and makes it easier to adjust your spend and monitor the effect. Being strict with your keyword match types and negative keyword lists minimises wasted spend and drops the sum of money required to market your brand. When you start to make adjustments, Google and Bing ads offer similar metrics to track the effectiveness of your intervention. Then you can decide what level of spend is right for your business.
If you need help with your brand traffic, then why not get in touch with us and see what we can do for you.
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