It's no great secret that people who search directly for your brand are more likely to convert when they land on your site.
For example, let's say you have an an online shoe store called "Kiwi Footwear" (random example, but hear me out).
People who search for "Kiwi footwear brown shoes for men" are - generally - more likely to convert into buyers than people who just search "brown shoes for men".
However, if you're not breaking out searches that include your brand name from those that do not, then reading your statistics and analyzing if you are doing well with Adwords can be difficult.
I've seen many Adwords campaigns that look successful on the outside. However, when you start digging in to the search term report, you find that the only searches that are generating a positive ROI are those which feature the client's brand name.
So how do you work this out - and what do you do to break out performance of branded vs non-branded terms to ensure an accurate appraisal of performance?
1. Select your campaign
2. Open up the search terms report (also, set a relatively long date range to look back, I often pick one year)
3. Apply a filter for search term text that contains your brand name.
4. You'll now see all the search terms that include your brand name
5. Make note of performance metrics like click through rate, cost-per click, conversion rate etc.
6. Reverse your filter to only show terms that do not include your brand.
7. Make note once again of those performance metrics.
8. Compare the two. You might be shocked at what you see.
I have worked on accounts where 90% of the converting traffic was coming from branded terms, and everything else was basically wasting money.
So what's the solution once you've broken out this data?
Create a branded search term campaign!
Set up a new campaign that targets your brand name (you can even set up ad groups within that target your key product lines/categories/services, e.g. "Kiwi Footwear men's shoes").
If you've got good conversion tracking data to corroborate performance, then I frequently recommend that you put a really high budget on your branded campaign - provided your cash flow can support this.
Why? Because branded clicks are frequently very profitable (i.e. for every $10 you spend in ads you might make $100 in conversions). You don't want to miss out on any of these clicks.
Once you've set up your branded campaign, you can then add your brand name (and variations) as negative keywords to your other campaigns.
This means that when someone searches your brand they get the ads from your branded campaign, "ring fencing" the performance of those terms into that campaign.
Now you can accurately appraise the performance of your other campaigns and optimize, rather than having a muddied view of performance because the branded search terms mixed in with regular terms artificially inflate performance.
If you need help with this concept, leave a comment below and I'll do my best to help you out!
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