February 2008

How to maximize your results
from Search Engine Marketing
Is bidding on your own brand in
paid search the right strategy? By Jay Aber

Perhaps the most common question I’m asked by our search engine marketing clients and students in the various seminars I deliver is whether bidding on your own brand in a paid search campaign is a sound strategy. At last, recent research from Google appears to set the record straight.

In a sponsored link, you can control the message delivered - you can promote a specific offer or product launch, and/or provide additional information to encourage people to buy your products.

For those who may be less familiar with search engine marketing, let me give you a quick background. When a user types a keyword into a search engine like Google, the results that appear in the white area directly underneath the search term are called natural or “organic” search results. These are the results the search engine returns as the most relevant based on all the pages it has indexed on Web sites across the Internet.

By contrast, search engines also return sponsored or “paid” text links on the page. These are also triggered by the keywords a user types into a search engine, but they are paid advertising that marketers “buy” in a live auction, based on how much marketers are willing to spend each time a user clicks on the vendor’s text ad. While the engines work to ensure the sponsored links are relevant to user searches, these results are paid ads.

The big question
Among search engine marketers, there is often disagreement about whether it makes good business sense for a direct marketer to bid on their own brands, products or company names so that paid sponsored links appear on the same page as the company’s own natural search results.
Some marketers feel that bidding on their own terms is a waste of money, especially if the company’s search result appears in a top position naturally. The belief is that most searchers (consumers) will click on the organic link most often, when presented with a choice between an organic or paid link. Moreover, the thinking goes that had there been no paid text link on the page, the user would have clicked on a natural link anyway. So in these cases, marketers are paying for clicks on sponsored links, when these same clicks could have been had for free.

The verdict is in
According to a recent study from Google, there is, in fact, significant synergy between having paid and natural links appear together on a search result. The combination of both links appearing on the same page delivers an increase in “free” click throughs on natural links, incremental click throughs overall, as well as multiple branding and purchase intent benefits.

In one example (See Figure 1) Google did a control and exposed test to gauge the impact of sponsored links, natural results and the combination of the two in terms of overall click through rate.
Not surprisingly, a top position for either natural or paid search was beneficial, but when both appeared on the same search result page, the improvement on click through rate exceeded the sum of the lift from both links separately. Interestingly, the presence of the sponsored link generated an additional lift in “free” clicks on the organic link as well.

The next chart (Figure 2) illustrates the extent to which search drives purchase consideration as well. Using the example of Churchill, a UK based insurance company, Google set out to quantify the impact on purchase consideration of various combinations of paid and natural search results on a Google search results page. Users saw a range of combinations including no company-specific links, company advertising links, natural search results and various combinations of paid and natural links. After exposure, researchers asked users which brands they would consider to purchase car insurance.

The results showed the additive effect of having both top paid and organic search results on the same page when it comes to purchase consideration.

If the quantitative data you’ve just seen hasn’t convinced you, then consider these other qualitative reasons why bidding on your own brands makes good business sense:

• As a marketer, you cannot fully control your company’s position within an organic search result – with a sponsored link you can bid so that your link appears in a top three position.

In a sponsored link, you can control the message delivered - you can promote a specific offer or product launch, and/or provide additional information to encourage people to buy your products. Whereas with natural results, the search engine selects the search result.

• Bidding on your own keyword is a prudent defensive strategy to ensure your company’s message appears more prominently than a competitor link, when users are searching for your company or brand. Do a test and type in your brand terms into a search engine – odds are that your competitors are already bidding on your brand terms and “stealing” clicks from your organic search results!

So the answer is clear – bidding on your own brand, company name, or products builds brands, purchase intent and generates valuable incremental traffic – some of it even for free.

For more than 13 years, Jay Aber, president of The Aber Group, has been advising Canadian marketing executives on how to use the Internet to create successful direct marketing campaigns. The Aber Group’s team of Internet direct marketing strategists, online media experts, and paid search engine marketing pros develop, execute and optimize online direct response campaigns for a broad range of blue chip clients. For more information, contact jay@abergroup.com or 416-322-2909 x222.