"Why does search get the credit for everything?" is a question that’s been asked frequently in marketing departments in recent years. It’s even the title of the keynote at this month's Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose. There will be a lot of search marketers in that room, and while I’m confident most of them stopped boasting a while ago about big returns driven through paid search on a company’s own branded terms, I’m not sure how many are giving full consideration to what search marketing can do to measure the value driven by efforts from other channels.
For historical reasons, search marketers tend to get defensive about branded search advertising. It took years of convincing brand owners to accept the concept of paying for search clicks on branded terms. CMO’s and CEO’s were adamant that it was foolish to pay for clicks when there was a perfectly serviceable free natural link at the top of the page, and it took test after test showing the incremental value of brand paid search to make them believers. Eventually, the word ‘cannibalization’ stopped being bandied about, and business lunches became all the more pleasant.
Brand search is still considered something of a freeloader. Customers searching on branded keywords are the proverbial fish in the barrel, and we know those customers were first baited and hooked by other anglers: Television, Display Advertising, Radio, Social Media, Print, Email, Direct Mail and, not to be forgotten, SEO and SEM campaigns on non-branded search terms. All of these channels impact branded search. Turn them off, and you’ll dial down your branded search volume the way the jets from a sprinkler die down when you crimp a garden hose.
But how much organizations have leveraged brand search behavior to understand the performance of the whole marketing mix that fuels it has been far less evident. Brand search ads do offer an opportunity to measure and analyze performance in other marketing channels. If your brand ads just serve as a proxy for the natural listing located an inch further south, you’re most likely missing some valuable insights. Here are some examples:
Imagine your brand is “Simon’s Smoothies” and you have 1,000 stores around the nation serving delicious blended fruit beverages. People search for your brand to find stores and navigate to your site to learn about new flavors and promotional offers. You serve a national brand search campaign which generates high click through rates averaging over twenty percent. You also run TV ads, radio, direct mail and display advertising in your target markets. Here are some ideas to get some extra mileage out of your brand search ads:
- Find Surges in Search on Your Brand: Say you have stores in San Francisco and Chicago and recently started blanketing the air waves in each market. Many people search online for directions to the locations but since they mostly interact with Google Maps, not enough visit your site to give you a true feel for enhanced demand. Your brand search campaign can give you that search volume detail by day and by hour, and if you create a local targeted version of the campaign for both markets, you easily can view the uptick comparatively between San Fran and the Windy City. The data may also help you determine which ads at which time of day or day of week are generating the greatest interest.
- Click-Through Rate Testing: Search is one of the easiest mediums to create and implement tests in. For starters, rotate your brand ads evenly and test which tag lines or type of messaging drive higher click-through rates for your text ads. If “delicious smoothie” messaging has a 15% lift in CTR over “healthy smoothie”, maybe that’s what you should be leading with in other channels.
- A/B Route Splitting: Split test your landing pages to find creative that resonates. Try a 20% off coupon versus a $2.00 off or determine which glistening smoothie picture generates greater engagement. Use what wins in other channels. This type of test marketing also works well with display advertising and non-branded search, but consider routing that traffic to different tests to segregate retention versus acquisition performance.
- Direct Response Measurement: If you end all of your print, radio or TV ads with a call to visit the hard-to-type “simonssmoothie.com”, you won’t be able to differentiate which ads had greater impact. One alternative to advertising vanity URLs is to encourage recipients to Google ‘simons coupon’ or another unique query, which you can buy cheap on exact match and differentiate by offline ad campaign. Although this may encourage competitors to bid on your keyword, the value in learning which offline placements really drive interest may outweigh the downside.