The ability to effectively track ROI and conversions in search advertising has long been one of PPC marketing’s major attractions; something that has always stood in contrast to the comparative challenge of accurately measuring success with brand marketing. But what if PPC was the perfect vehicle to do both?

Ascertaining the Lifetime Value of a Customer

With all the data and certainty that PPC brings, it’s all too easy for search advertisers to miss the bigger picture of any marketing campaign, and that’s to build a loyal customer base through brand exposure. Any purchase of your product or service has the potential to create a loyal customer that will spend the next twenty years singing your brand’s praises to all and sundry.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a non-definitive metric that can involve anything from crude interpretation of consumer behaviour to sophisticated predictive analytics (Harvard’s Business School has created this neat little tool to get you starting to think about it). The metric seeks to understand the lifetime value of a customer and includes things like repeat business, brand advocacy and direct referrals of business. In the B2B sphere this can be especially crucial.

As search data increasingly becomes integrated with audience data from data management platforms, the more advertisers can build up an accurate picture of their consumers and begin to accurately track their journey through the purchasing funnel, from brand awareness through to purchase. The ability to more effectively track offline conversions is also enabling PPC advertisers to better tap into and understand CLV, which in turn helps to build up an understanding of the true value of each conversion.

Why Build Brand using PPC?

A lot of smaller companies simply can’t afford the advertising budgets to get their brand in big industry / consumer publications and PPC advertising can act as the perfect bridge to this financial gap, allowing small brands to build and track brand identity and awareness within their target markets. What’s more; the increasing range of platforms and content on offer, such as Google’s new 360 degree video ads, is allowing advertisers and content marketers to get creative like never before with their brand advertising.

There are many reasons using branding in search advertising is important to build brand awareness quickly and effectively.

Look at some key reasons why you might want to push brand:

  • New-to-market brands
  • Product launches
  • New store locations
  • Pushing into new markets
  • Rebranding

A recent study across 12 different sectors by Google and IposMedia CT found brand awareness received a notable boost when PPC ads contained prominent branding, with 14.8% of respondents naming the test brand compared to just 8.2% in the control group. Clearly this kind of advertising can prove extremely effective in building brand awareness whether or not consumers are clicking on the ads.

One way of pushing your brand with PPC is to target branded keywords. Of course, to many the idea of using PPC to target brand terms may seem like a complete waste of money. Why would you need to target branded keywords when your company should really be ranking number 1 for them in the organic SERPs?

Here are a few reasons:

  • High quality scores and CTR’s: It has been speculated that this can increase the success of future campaigns.
     
  • Dominate the SERPs: Having your brand appear in the sponsored ads and organic listings helps you dominate screen real estate on branded searches.
     
  • Control over brand message: SEO nowadays means complying to Google’s strict webmasters guidelines, which inherently limits the way in which you can present your brand in organic listings.
     
  • Low Price: Branded keywords and terms are invariably cheap.
     
  • Promoting new products / services: If you decide to push a new product line then paid search can help you rank number one on key brand search terms quickly, whilst your organic rankings take the time to catch up.
     
  • Reputation management: If your brand name should end up ranking high in the SERPs for all the wrong reasons, then effective brand advertising through PPC will go some way in pushing those unwelcome search results down the page.

Building a PPC Campaign to build Brand Awareness

Whilst this is in no way a definitive guide, there are a few things to bear in mind when planning and calibrating your PPC campaign to produce brand awareness, instead of focusing solely on conversions.

  • Identify your audience based on the platforms they tend to frequent. If your customers connect with brands on social media, then focus your energies there.
     
  • Think about how branding can play with mobile ads. This is still a relatively new digital space so there could be a huge potential for leveraging brand presence and influencing behaviour with targeted ads.
     
  • Focus your keywords on “top of the funnel” searches, avoiding searches that imply intent to buy and aiming for more general and topical search terms. Targeting customers at the right point in the purchasing funnel is key here. You want to be targeting the window shoppers not the made-their-mind-up shoppers.

  • Impressions are all important to brand advertising and you should consider pricing your campaign on a cost per impression basis (CPI).

  • Clicks are still important and user behaviour after they land on your site will be all important in helping you understand the way people are interacting with your brand and your content.

  • Differentiating between return and new customers is crucial. Try to focus on getting new eyes on your ads, whilst trying to push returning customers through to other more direct advertising to close the sale / conversion.

Wordstream Content Marketing specialist, Margot da Cunha, recently conducted a fascinating comparative analysis of PPC brand marketing from some well known brands which is well worth checking out. It may even spark some ideas you can use for your own new PPC brand marketing campaign.

 

By Thomas Coppen, Technical Director of Keel Over Marketing.

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