The Battle Between Branded vs. General Keywords
ADOTAS EXCLUSIVE — You spend many years cultivating a brand and building its equity. Or, in contrast, you build a business selling the brands others have built. Either way, when it comes time to market your self through SEM, you leverage that equity. Logic dictates brand-based keywords should perform best, and they often do. But can you distinguish what percentage of your sales are just brand-based conversions and what percentage is new market share generated through your SEM efforts?
Despite the emergence of robust tacking systems, strong analytical tools and a library of best practice data to help people properly structure their PPC campaigns and target their SEO efforts, I continue to see major advertisers making incorrect conclusions about the value of their branded and general keywords.
A recent campaign audit my agency conducted clearly illustrates this point. The prospect came to us seeking volume growth and complaining that sales had steadily declined over the past year. While the sales that were being generated provided positive ROI, they simply were too few in number. As we always do, we immediately added our tracking code to begin collecting data from the existing PPC campaigns, allowing them to continue running while we developed a new strategy and built out new campaigns. We also dug into historical campaign data to see what lead to the decline and where we saw opportunity for growth.
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