Branded keywords play an important-often dominant-role in your paid search marketing programs.

It’s therefore vital to intelligently manage and organize branded keywords. It’s also very important, and a completely separate task, to control how branded queries are matched with other keywords in your PPC programs.

Why Branded Terms Are Different

Brand term click-through-rates and conversion rates generally exceed those of non-branded terms by quite some margin. CTR’s are often 3x, 5x or higher than their non-branded counterparts. ROI for branded keywords is commonly measured in thousands-of-percentage points.

If brand terms are mixed into ad-groups across your PPC program, the results you see at either an ad-group or campaign level will show the blended averages of the branded and non-branded terms; this does not provide an accurate view of reality and therefore makes the numbers effectively worthless.

A client for whom we recently started work, for example, had an ad-group deeply mixed between branded and category terms. Looking at a campaign report you’d see that the ad-group had a 3.90% CTR a 0.86% conversion rate - about half of other comparable ad-groups within that campaign.

A closer look inside the ad-group, however, revealed a far different picture.

The branded terms had a 16.61% CTR and 1.67% conversion rate, while the non-branded terms had only a 2.48% CTR and a 0.26% conversion rate.

Clearly these numbers give three very different impressions of how the campaign is performing and of the type and urgency of changes that may need to be made.

Organizing Branded Keywords

To gain a more clear and accurate view of campaign performance, and more actionable data, pull all branded keywords out of the ad-groups they’re scattered across, and put them into branded-only ad-groups within a purely branded campaign.

These groups should produce terrific results. Take advantage of the opportunity to really work on testing text-ads for your branded terms, and since these groups/ads usually gain great quality score rankings you should be able to cost effectively attain strong top or near-top positions.

Another way to leverage this new focus is to keep a close eye on the impression share numbers in Google as you really don’t want to miss potential inventory with this campaign. It may even be necessary to raise bids not because you want to change your average position (although that may be the results) but instead because you want ensure that your close to or achieve 100% impression share.

Managing the Resulting Non-Branded Ad-Groups

If your brand terms were outperforming (which is virtually always true) the reported results for the ad-groups from which the branded terms have been removed will usually decrease. This can be quite shocking at first, but I’ve never seen anything but positive long term results from the process.

But by seeing the remaining keywords for what they are you can make much better decisions about the work these ad-groups need moving forward.

• You may realize that working a lot harder on the text-ads is necessary to see if it’s possible to drive the CTR’s up.
• You may need to revisit and either expand or contract the keyword lists, or tune the match-types.
• It’s very possible that you’ll decide certain keywords just aren’t working and never will, and pause or delete them.

In effect, now you have to do the hard work of managing a non-branded campaign. Central to your success is a willingness to test and manipulate all of the controls which are available to you.

Query Management

When your branded keywords are all segregated within selected campaigns and ad-groups, the next challenge is making sure the search engines don’t go around you with their broad/standard matching rules.

It’s not uncommon at all to see user searches for a brand name matched to category and product names which are set on broad/standard match even though that same brand name has an exact match keyword setup in a different campaign.

There are many problems with this. The first is that you’re no longer controlling your messaging but instead letting the engine ‘decide’ which of the ad-groups and keywords (and corresponding text ads, bids, and landing pages) are the best to apply to queries containing your branded terms.

In this case, you’ve lost control of the user experience both inside the engine and on your website.

In addition, since the branded queries still click-through and convert at much higher rates than non-branded searches, your search results are once again polluted (or at least unfairly shifted) by the performance of branded terms.

Another Approach

For the more sophisticated, either in terms of thinking or tools, it should be pointed out that it is possible to classify keywords using certain reporting packages, and gain the insight and clarity of brand-segregation without completing the physical separation process.

The downside of this approach is that it may limit your ability to target your creative, monitor your impression share, and limit queries to matching only the actual branded terms via the use of negatives.

Summary

In the world of search, brand terms are from venus and all other keywords are from mars. Configuring campaigns to force their separation produces better control, better reporting clarity, and better bottom line results.