The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

When you select keywords for your search marketing campaigns, you’re trying to identify customers who want whatever it is that you have to offer. This is easier to understand if we think about “searchers” rather than “keywords.” Keywords can be ambiguous, but searchers aren’t. (For example, you would manage the keyword “lipstick” differently depending on whether you were targeting “searchers looking to buy Revlon lipstick” or “searchers looking for information about the television show Lipstick Jungle.”) Let’s state this idea as a general rule: every search marketer is targeting “searchers looking for me, (whether they know it or not).” Adding keywords and negative keywords, targeting by language and targeting by locations—all of these are ways of applying that general rule to your particular business. None of them is a perfect fit, but one instance almost is: “searchers looking for my brand name.” These searchers are looking for you, and they know it.

Every search marketer should build a campaign around their brand name. If you have a well-designed and informative Web site, then you’re probably doing well with organic search results already. Nonetheless, there’s no reason to neglect the “Sponsored” results.

Bidding on your brand name is easy and profitable, and a new recommendation in Clickable’s ActEngine will guide you through the process. When you see that recommendation appear for one of your accounts, there are two major benefits that you should keep in mind.

1) It’s Cheap.
The actual cost per click (CPC) that you pay for your search marketing ads depends on two factors: your bid and your Quality Score. As we’ve discussed in detail in our best practices tutorial on the topic, a Quality Score is “the measure of an ad’s relevance to a user’s search.” Few ads are more relevant to a user than one that points them to the Web site of the brand they’re searching for. Therefore, a campaign built around your brand name will be rewarded with a very high Quality Score, driving down your costs significantly. (For a detailed discussion of how Quality Score affects cost, click here.)

2) It’s the Easiest Way to Appear in the “Premium” Positions
One of the most coveted spots for a search marketing ad to appear is above the organic search results, rather than alongside them. As Ehren pointed out last week, Quality Score has always been an important factor in determining which ads appeared in those positions, and, with recent changes to Google’s algorithm, it just got more important. Because the Quality Score on your brand terms will be about as high as you’re likely to get for any term, bidding on your brand name is the best way to land a “premium” position.

Of course, there’s not much to prevent your competitors from bidding on your brand name, and you’ll want to do what you can to protect your trademarked terms. We’ll discuss how to do so in a future post.

Hanny, Clickable SEM Guru
 
Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.

A few weeks back, we discussed strategies for bidding on your brand name . As we said then, every search

In the past few weeks, we’ve introduced support for Image Ads (and other emerging ad formats )

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