Brands on Fire: Maximizing Your Google Ads Branded Campaigns

"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host, Brandon Baitman. Today, we're going to talk all about branded campaigns on Google. What are they? Why would you set them up? How do you set them up? What are the common misconceptions that people have around them? What are the best metrics to measure to know if they're performing well? Where do people end up wasting a lot of money on branded campaigns, or even worse, wasting money on your cold traffic campaigns because your branded campaign covers up a massive problem in your account? I'm excited to see you there."

"Alright, how are you doing today, Garrett?"

"Doing great, how are you?"

"Doing awesome. I'm excited for our topic today. We're talking all about branded campaigns in Google Ads. A lot of people don't even know that this is a thing, honestly. If you really think about it, it is a thing. But if you don't, then you might not. So for anybody who's unfamiliar with what a branded campaign or let's just say branded keyword are in Google Ads, how would you describe that?"

"Yeah, it is a campaign where you bid on the name of your brand, on the name of your company. Pretty simple."

"Yeah, it is pretty simple. So if you are Baitman Collective, this would be if somebody searches on Google for Baitman Collective, there you are, there's your brand new campaign. If anybody wants to see it, just Google Baitman Collective and you might just see it. But don't click on it because that costs us money. But the back off, but we need to click through rate too for our quality score."

"Yeah, maybe I'm just ruining our quality score, but anyway, that's putting that aside. There's a lot of debate around branded campaigns and it's one of the most weird parts of PPC, especially when you have a lot of volume. There are people that generally fall into two different camps. Here's the elephant in the room, so to speak, when it comes to branded campaigns. They come through your PPC campaign, your PPC campaign is their last interaction with you as a company. But I can tell you, nobody's searching for your brand online that didn't find out about you somewhere else. They must have found out about you through some other channel. There are some marketing channels that are really popular for this, like anything that generates a lot of brand awareness. For example, let's just say you're cold calling and you're not saying the name of your company. How much branded search traffic is that going to generate? Really minimal, not that much. Even PPC doesn't generate that much brand recognition because it's a small group of people that actually search. But where you start to get a lot more people searching for your brand is when you're doing channels that have a larger number of impressions. This is going to like Facebook ads, for example. For every person that actually fills out the form, you're going to have a ton that were exposed to your brand and they could actually end up Googling you. You're going to have like TV, radio are both channels in this industry that like most of our clients that do TV or radio, they have a ton of branded traffic. These ones are especially popular. The reason being like you might say a phone number on the TV ad, but people aren't going to remember it and they're going to end up just searching for your company online. Even some of our clients that send like massive volumes of direct mail will find that there's a lot of branded traffic from that because they'll get this postcard from this company and then they'll look up the company to see if they can find some more information. Regardless, one thing you'll notice about all that is every lead that you generate from a branded source came from somewhere else beforehand. One of the biggest mistakes that I see people making in their CRMs is they use their CRM as if every lead only has one way that it came to us, which isn't exactly true. I think the way to mark those leads in your CRM is either as the original channel with PPC being like a secondary channel that helped get the lead or just ignore PPC altogether but then throw the PPC spend with it. It's a weird situation because I think on average PPC takes too much credit for branded leads."

"Oh yeah, absolutely. It's so easy to get caught in the addiction of branded traffic where those leads are so cheap that you start to overvalue their true worth. Because like you said, you've already paid for that traffic most likely in other ways and by paying for it twice on paid search, there's a balancing game of what I have gotten this traffic regardless of me having that branded ad on Google or not. You have to do some testing to see where the marginal gain is with your branded campaigns."

"Yeah, and you and I haven't actually talked about how we do this and how we determine what can you pay for a branded campaign. I'm curious to see how our opinions differ. I can tell you my opinion of the ultimate way to do this is to do a conversion lift test, but you just can't do it in this industry. To explain, I know there's a famous study done on eBay where eBay did a branded conversion lifts test on Google. Basically what they do is they say every other day we're going to run a branded campaign and we're going to do that for a period of three months or whatever the case is. What we're monitoring is every time you turn on your PPC, you're going to find that you get less organic search because if you don't have a PPC ad there, then you're still going to show up most likely for your brand organically. If you don't show up for your brand organically, PPC is one of your biggest opportunities to show up really quickly for your brand organically. But most companies will show up for their brand organically. What they notice is every time you turn on the PPC, your organic traffic plummets and your paid traffic goes up. You can eventually measure if we turn on the PPC, then it increases the likelihood of the traffic coming to us by whatever percent. You have to recognize that a certain percentage of your traffic you get through PPC was going to come in organically anyways. The problem is if you're eBay, you can do that. If you're just like whatever wholesaler in whatever market that gets much less branded traffic than eBay does, you might be running that experiment for three years and all the while every experiment that you run has a bad side that's not working as well. You have to make some smarter judgments as to how you want to value the branded traffic. It's not always black and white, but the assumption that I use in my head, there's a couple things that I'll look at. The first one is are there other people bidding on our brand in our market? Because if there was theoretically nobody bidding on your brand, then a branded ad is not really necessary because the main thing you want to protect from is other people showing up above you for your own brand, especially on mobile devices where the seller might have to scroll a long way to find your ad. Then the other thing I do outside of that is I just assume that the brand cost per lead is about four times what it shows in platform. The reason for that is I just use this basic assumption of like 75% of the people probably would have found you anyways. It's a random assumption. I don't actually have great data for it, but it helps me understand that if I'm paying $100 per lead on a branded campaign, in my mind I want to think of that probably is closer to $400 because three out of four leads would have found me anyways."

"Yeah, I look at it in a very similar way. I look at a BR campaign as essentially like how much of the real estate do I own versus how hard is it to keep that real estate. If I have great SEO, there is no reason to run a branded campaign assuming that there aren't a large number of other people bidding on my branded terms. Likewise, if I have bad SEO but there's no one bidding on my terms, then again I probably will rank high still. Then the third thing I look at is the quality of who is bidding on my terms. If they're a business that I know I can beat on service or quality or they're not a true peer or they're not in market, I'm not worried about them being on top because I know that they're not a true threat. So those are the things that I look at: who's bidding on it, how many people are bidding on it, and then how's my SEO. With those three things, I use that to gauge how aggressively to bid on branded."

"Yeah, when it comes to SEO, what you basically want to look for is if somebody searches for your brand name, do you show up on the Google business profile and on the website number one. You could have really weak SEO across many keywords. If you at least have your brand, which having your brand is pretty easy, if you just launched a website today you might not rank for your brand, but most people without significant SEO investment can eventually rank for their brand just because you're actually the most relevant thing for that search. Google's going to try to get you there. I can tell you one time where this gets a little bit tricky is when we have brands that are a little bit more generic, which is very common in this space. I'll give the example of we even have one client that had two brands. For anonymity purposes, I won't share every detail, but one of their brands was like 'Sell To' and then the person's name that owned the company. Their other brand was 'Insert the Location Home Buyer' that they were in. So they had these two separate brands. They did a lot of direct mail in one of them and then they did a lot of TV for the other one. The issue that we ran into, we ran branded campaigns for both of those. What we found for this particular client, and this is true generally across other things, is when they had a name like 'Ut

ah Home Buyers' in one market and then 'Baitman Home Buyers' in another market, what we found is when they had a generic brand name like 'Utah Home Buyers,' when somebody's looking up Utah Home Buyers, that's an actual competitive search term. What are we seeing in that market? There's a lot of other people that bid on the term Utah Home Buyers because they're thinking of all the different home buyers in Utah that they can compete against, which is different than just one branded name. In that market, branded campaigns were really critical because if you're going to compete against Utah Home Buyers, everybody in Utah is thinking, 'I want to be a home buyer.' So they're bidding on those terms. Versus if you have a brand name that's just like Baitman Home Buyers, that means Baitman is pretty specific to the company. That means your direct competitors might bid on you, but you won't see a lot of general competition bidding on you. So that's one thing that I see very commonly is if you have a branded name that's very specific to your company, branded campaigns are less important. If you have a brand name that's more generic, like I said Utah Home Buyers, you're going to see more competition and you're going to see a lot more value in branded campaigns."

"Yeah, that's a really good point because I think the type of name you choose for your brand does impact how competitive your branded keywords are. And if your brand name is something common or generic, you might find that you're competing with unrelated searches or businesses, which makes bidding on those terms more necessary. So it’s not just about bidding on your brand name, but also understanding the landscape and how your brand name fits into it."

"Absolutely. And I think another thing to consider is not just the competition for your brand name, but also the cost of the traffic itself. Generic brand names can sometimes be more expensive because you're competing with broader search terms that can have higher costs per click. So even though it might seem straightforward to run a branded campaign, it's important to think strategically about how your brand name influences those costs and whether it's worth the investment."

"Yeah, and just to wrap this up, I think the takeaway for our listeners is that branded campaigns can be a powerful tool, but you need to approach them with a clear strategy and an understanding of how they fit into your overall marketing plan. Look at your SEO, check who's bidding on your terms, and evaluate how generic or specific your brand name is to determine how aggressively you need to bid. It's all about finding that balance and making sure you're not overspending where you don't need to."

"Exactly. It's all about smart spending and making sure every dollar you invest in PPC is working as hard as it can for you. Well, Garrett, thanks for diving into this with me today. I think we’ve covered a lot of ground on branded campaigns."

"My pleasure, Brandon. Always great chatting with you about these topics."

"Thanks for tuning in, everyone. If you have any questions or want to share your own experiences with branded campaigns, feel free to reach out. Until next time, this is Brandon Baitman, signing off from the Collective Clicks podcast. Stay savvy out there!"

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