Search Engine Marketing

SEM

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is one of the most effective ways to grow your business in an increasingly competitive marketplace. With millions of businesses out there all vying for the same eyeballs, it’s never been more important to advertise online, and search engine marketing is the most effective way to promote your products and grow your business.

In this guide, you'll learn an overview of search engine marketing basics as well as some tips and strategies for doing search engine marketing right.

How to approach rising Google brand CPC ?
Here's How..

• Branded keywords, or keywords that include the name of the advertiser bidding on those keywords, have long been a source of controversy in the paid search industry. For years, many paid search managers grouped these keywords into reports that reflected total account performance.

• This tends to overinflate the value of paid search campaigns since most brand queries are navigational and reflect a user that is already intent on buying from the brand searched for. As such, brand conversion rate is typically significantly higher than that of non-brand traffic and high brand return on ad spend (ROAS) can cover up underperforming non-brand campaigns.

• These days, most advertisers are hip to the fact that they should be looking at brand and non-brand performance separately. However, there have been a lot of changes over time that might impact an advertiser’s brand keyword strategy, starting with a significant increase in the price of these keywords over the years.

The price of brand keywords ain’t what it used to be

• Google has long given advertisers an advantage over competitors in bidding on their brand terms by way of quality score, which is generally very high for an advertiser bidding on its own terms and lower for competitors trying to show ads on those terms. This makes a lot of sense in terms of providing users with a quality experience since the query indicates that the user is probably most interested in going to the website for that particular brand and that Google should prioritize the brand’s listing as opposed to a competitor.

• This quality score advantage plays a direct role in the price advertisers pay for brand keywords and has long suppressed average cost-per-click below what many advertisers might be willing to pay for brand traffic. However, that gap is becoming smaller over time.

• Evaluating Merkle (my employer) advertiser data, average brand CPC rose more than 20% between Q4 2017 and Q3 2018 before final slowing over the last couple of quarters.

• Google’s response to the increases that specific advertisers see typically references competitive forces encroaching on these auctions. That may well be true, but Google itself is responsible for the extent to which competitors can drive up brand CPC.

• This goes back to the quality score advantage most advertisers have over competitors for their brand terms. Changes to advertisers’ relative quality score impact the ad ranks of those brands, which directly affects the CPC an advertiser must pay.

• For example, say Google started giving competitors even worse quality scores for an advertiser’s brand keywords. If the advertiser were paying just enough to beat the ad rank of the closest competitor, this change should result in lower brand CPC, since competitors’ ad ranks would go down with worse quality score.

• The opposite can certainly also happen, with Google giving competitors greater quality scores relative to an advertiser bidding on its brand terms. This would naturally increase an advertiser’s CPC.

• Of course, Google’s response to unpalatable CPC increases is to call out the fact that advertisers have control over how much they pay for branded traffic.

Can I just not pay for brand listings? Maybe!

After years of debate, the answer to whether a brand can forego bidding on brand keywords altogether and still receive all the traffic from branded queries remains the same: it depends on the brand.

• If the brand is big enough and the competition sparse enough that all or nearly all brand searchers end up making their way to the brand’s website without a paid ad, it should certainly consider turning off brand ads to save the money. However, most brands do see a dip in traffic and orders when turning off brand ads, and the only way to measure just how significant that dip might be is through testing – though again, changes to the SERP can render any past tests useless at a moment’s notice.

• Advertisers’ appetite for bidding on brand keywords despite higher CPCs isn’t infinite, and there is a point at which brands should call it quits despite the potential for lost clicks and sales, though Google certainly doesn’t want to reach that point. While paid search marketers are somewhat at the mercy of Google’s auction systems in determining CPC, they can still take proactive steps to learn as much as possible about the incremental lift coming from brand ads and install safeguards to ensure increases in CPC are controlled.