Host

• Kevin Dieny

Links from Episode

• Paid Search Marketing Team Consulting Services by CallSource

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Kevin Dieny: Hello, welcome to the Close the Loop podcast. I’m Kevin Dieny your host. And today we’re going to be talking about the advantages of the paid search channel. Specifically the advantages of using a branded campaign in paid search. Which is a little bit different. So really to set the episode up, I wanted to highlight, the basics.

[00:00:24] Kevin Dieny: So everyone is on the same page here. When we’re talking about paid search, we’re really talking about a channel where your visitors, or people, who you’re targeting, your audience. You’re being able to position marketing to them, a message to them because they’ve queried or they’ve typed in, or they’ve searched for something with, you know, with keywords.

[00:00:48] Kevin Dieny: That are aligned with your brand, your product, your services, some something to do with you. So if, for instance, let’s say someone types in ‘plumbers near me,’ right? So, plumbers being the service they’re, looking for, ‘near me’ being like the locale, location, proximity, right? So if you’re targeting that keyword, you could be targeting for plumbers, you’re targeting for near me.

[00:01:13] Kevin Dieny: Hopefully you’re targeting for the plumbers. So people who are typing in these things, people use Google all the time. People use Bing, people use all kinds of different search providers online to help them find things. And when they, whatever they type in each word is a Keyword. And you are able to target each of the keywords that they type in, or the whole keyword, the entire phrase, they type in the exact wording they type in.

[00:01:36] Kevin Dieny: Things like that, with a paid search campaign. So that is really different than say, I want to target everyone who lives five miles from this point or who lives in this zip code? Or I want to target everyone who likes basketball. The different advertisement channels, right? They all work a little differently in how they target.

[00:01:57] Kevin Dieny: For instance, television is whoever’s watching this, whoever happens to be watching this channel or this stream or this program at this moment in time, that’s, who’s going to see it. And that’s your audience, right? So the size of the audience is one thing, but how qualified they are, how aligned they are, how relevant they are to your business at this time is much more important.

[00:02:20] Kevin Dieny: It is is not less important than, than quantity, because you still want people to, to reach. So it advertisement is always balancing the quality of who you’re after with the quantity, how many people are you going after? And usually they are a little exclusive. So, and by that, I mean, you sometimes have to give up a little bit of quality to get a lot more quantity.

[00:02:44] Kevin Dieny: Or give up some quantity for quality. So when we’re talking about Branded Paid Search Campaigns, that’s also a little different. So we’re in the paid search realm. Now we’re targeting people who typed in some combination of keywords on Google, right? That’s the simplest example, but the words they typed in, now we’re targeting branded terms, branded words.

[00:03:06] Kevin Dieny: And by that we’re, we’re talking about, words that contain your brand name, words that contain your, your product or your service. Words that contained trademarked is another way to think about it. Like any term you have trademarked is probably a branded term.

[00:03:22] Kevin Dieny: You could be thinking about your brand, you’re like, well, my brand is called Bill’s plumbing, okay. So let’s use that example. So plumbing isn’t really a branded term, but “Bill’s Plumbing” together. That might be a little more branded. There might be a lots of brands of Bill’s plumbing’s out there, but in your area, there may only be you, or there may be you and another Bill’s Plumbing.

[00:03:44] Kevin Dieny: I don’t know. But essentially branded terms are ones that are telling you that the person typing this in knows exactly what they’re after and they kind of know who they are after. We think of things like Kleenex, right. As being a branded term, because that’s the name of the brand. But some people use Kleenex to describe the tissue when it’s actually like a soft tissue paper is what, it’s, what it is.

[00:04:17] Kevin Dieny: That’s what the product is. But the brand is now become synonymous with the product. So that that’s where it gets a little blurry. But for the most part, if someone’s typing in Bill’s Plumbing and they happened to be in your locale, they’re probably looking for you. So when we’re talking about creating branded campaigns, we’re really specifically focusing on those campaigns where we’re targeting people who are basically looking for you or looking for the product or service that is very specific, but that you you carry or that you have.

[00:04:49] Kevin Dieny: Right. So. I’m uh uh being a little vague because branded terms are vast and it’s kind of difficult to separate all the branded terms the business has from their non-branded. And non-branded terms like plumbing, you know, pipes, those things are found everywhere. Pipes can be in a lot of things. Pipes are in data, pipes are in plumbing.

[00:05:09] Kevin Dieny: Pipes are in electrical pipes. You know, lots of different industries. So when someone just types in pipe, what are they really looking for? Plastic, metal, you know? So the more specific they get, that is where it gets into branded terms. If they’re just like a TV is another example, just looking for a TV.

[00:05:28] Kevin Dieny: That’s one thing, you’re looking for a Samsung TV. See now Samsung is a branded term. Vizio branded term, right? Sony branded terms. So when we’re talking about creating a branded paid search campaign, the advantages of that are that these people really know your brand or they really know a specific product or service or something like that, that they’re looking for, that you happen to have, that you carry, that you’re trying to sell.

[00:05:55] Kevin Dieny: And that’s, that’s what we’re after here in this episode is to talk about that. So some of the advantages, right? Obviously, maybe they come to mind just talking about this. If someone looking for, for you that’s, like an easy way to someone looking for who you are for who you are and what you sell is a much easier sale than someone who’s not looking for you and has no idea what you do.

[00:06:18] Kevin Dieny: And they have no need for what you do. You want to sell to people who have a need for what it is you’re selling. You don’t want to sell it to people who don’t want what you’re selling. It’s a waste of time for them and for you. So how do you find those gems, right? Those people who are looking for you, looking for what you sell.

[00:06:37] Kevin Dieny: And that’s what we’re after. The advantages of course, being these people are much higher quality. They’re intent, meaning they they’re looking to buy either soon or in the near future is much higher. They are probably a better fit because they know about you. Some either by word of mouth or they’ve searched before, they visited before.

[00:06:56] Kevin Dieny: So they’re a little bit more educated that are a little bit more familiar with you. They are probably, at that point where they don’t need to be persuaded a ton to do business with. And marketing looks at that like they’re probably at the end of a lot of touches, right? So every touch, a customer, prospective customer, or future customer has with your business, we call, we call it a touch.

[00:07:21] Kevin Dieny: So every time a visitor sees your website, touch. Every time they hear your brand or see an ad or anything to do with your brand or products or services, that’s touches. So on average, I think this is, um, a stat. I think it’s like between 7 and 14 touches between a brand and its prospective customers is how many times, how many touches it really takes for them to convert or sell or become into your database so that you can market to them even further.

[00:07:53] Kevin Dieny: But generally speaking 7 to 14 is kind of a lot, like if each touch costs you $10, right then seven touches is $70 just to convert them. In some industries might be a lot higher than the $10. But when we’re talking about branded terms, we’re talking about branded audiences who our audiences who are using branded terms.

[00:08:17] Kevin Dieny: In advertising and coming to you with these queries that are branded, my goodness. That means that they are farther along those touch points. That means that they’ve probably had interactions with you in the past and they are much closer to buying. In the marketing funnel, we would say these are in the bottom of the funnel.

[00:08:41] Kevin Dieny: So, if you could just market to the people in the bottom of the funnel and survive, your business could thrive then, fantastic. You’re basically only talking to people who want to buy from you, ready to buy it from you, who are well-educated, who are knowledgeable. They are aware of the problem that they have.

[00:08:56] Kevin Dieny: They’re aware of the solutions you provide, and they’re interested in what you have. They trust you. Right? So if you can check all those boxes off, that’s the ideal customer. Now there’s a couple of problems with branded campaigns, especially in paid search. And one of them, one of the arguments is, if they’re using my brand name to search for me, they’re probably going to get to my website, anyway.

[00:09:22] Kevin Dieny: They’re probably going to get to me anyway, if the intent is that high, why do I need an ad for that? Another argument is, these branded searches, they’re coming to my website. They’re going to convert, anyway. They’re going to call because there’s, they’re using my brand name, they’re using my trademark service.

[00:09:39] Kevin Dieny: They’re using the exact phrase that I’m targeting, you know, with my website. And so they’re going to convert anyway. And the last one that I’ve heard is, well, branded traffic is mostly my current customers, right? My current patients, they’re the ones who already know who we are. That’s why they’re using the branded terms to find me.

[00:10:00] Kevin Dieny: So why, again, after all that, it’s like, why advertise? Why create? Why spend money on people that know who you are, know what you do? You know what I mean? In the bottom of the funnel, why do we want to spend money there to get people to buy when they’re probably going too. Well, that probably those assumptions you’re making about whether they, they are going to convert they are going to buy from me anyway.

[00:10:24] Kevin Dieny: Those are costly mistakes. Just to answer that flatly, as simply as I can, because it… took so much effort to get them to the bottom of the funnel, right. It took lots of education. It took them being aware of their problem. It took them knowing that you have their solution. It took a lot to get them to that point.

[00:10:45] Kevin Dieny: They’re near the finish line. Are you just going to hope and trust and that all that group of people who’s there is just going to go to the finish line? In some regard, that’s where you should be spending money, right? Get those people who are pretty close and try to make it more guaranteed.

[00:11:02] Kevin Dieny: Try to get more. At the top of the funnel you’re talking tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, billions of people who have no idea they have a problem. Who are barely finding out about this stuff. Who are interested, but maybe not that interested and you’re moving them down. It goes from, you know, millions down to just thousands in the middle of the funnel, maybe hundreds or less.

[00:11:21] Kevin Dieny: And then we’re, it could be single digits or double digits in the, in the bottom of the funnel on any given day. You spent six, seven touches up to that point. And now you’re just going to hope that they cross the finish line. It doesn’t work. And spending all your money at the top, hoping that they convert at the bottom, is sort of the backwards way you should be thinking about it.

[00:11:42] Kevin Dieny: Sometimes the best place to put a campaign, especially a new campaign. If you’re a business that doesn’t spend a whole lot of money on marketing. Is to start with some branded campaigns first and some mix it in with some highly targeted, maybe bottom of funnel, middle of funnel, uh, campaigns to mix it up kind of like hybrid strategy.

[00:12:03] Kevin Dieny: So that’s where the misnomers are. That’s my initial take on those arguments. Also, if you think that you’re good, if it’s like, you’re like confident and a hundred percent confident that it’s a hundred percent of my current customers who are using my branded terms and branded keywords and stuff, then you could test that out.

[00:12:22] Kevin Dieny: You could check it, you could see if that is the case. If you’re tracking your marketing really well, you could see, okay, everyone who’s coming in from my branded campaign. A hundred percent of that traffic that converts over, I would say give it 90 days. If you’re to see how much of your branded conversions and sales come from current customers and stuff like that, using a branded campaign.

[00:12:47] Kevin Dieny: And you can do that. If you track your marketing really well, you can even see, you know, down to the keywords that are branded, or down to a branded campaign. Whether that’s generating calls or form fields or anything, whatever your conversion is sales, from those campaigns. You can, you can do that. You can set that all up and then you can be confident and have the data to back it up.

[00:13:04] Kevin Dieny: Because a lot of times it’s sort of an assumption, a hunch, right? And marketing can be a lot of times going off hunches when you don’t have all the data, but from someone who’s done this before, who has a lot of experience in this, I can tell you that a lot of the branded campaigns aren’t, current customers. They might be returning visitors.

[00:13:25] Kevin Dieny: You know, that’s kind of the point of the bottom of the funnel, especially people who know your branded terms, but at the same time, it’s so helpful to be able to control your messaging at the bottom to those people. Because you might hit the bottom you want to have a little more of a push toward buying. You may not be like, Hey, let’s educate you on pipes and leaks and stuff.

[00:13:46] Kevin Dieny: And at the bottom you may be more like, Hey, look, here’s the deal. Here’s the offer. Book our plumbing services today, and that could be a really strong offer for that audience that works really well with them. That obviously wouldn’t work at all in the middle and the top of the funnel. Cause those people don’t even know, you know that they’re not there yet.

[00:14:03] Kevin Dieny: They’re not ready to go. They’re not ready to jump on it. Some local services when people are looking for them, they have the problem. And they’re really aware, like my bathroom is filling up with water. I need a plumber over here as soon as possible. They may just call whoever is the first one to show up in the search result, fine.

[00:14:21] Kevin Dieny: But if you put an ad for branded terms and if you don’t know this ads show up above the first organic results. So if you’re going to put a branded campaign together and paid search and you force your ads to the top, whenever people use your branded terms. Then whenever someone quickly jumps in there and types in, you know, a plumbing emergency local plumber near me or whatever.

[00:14:47] Kevin Dieny: And any other words, if any of those branded words show up and your ad shows, it will be the number one spot. So they, they might end up calling you right off the bat right off there. The other big thing I hear about reason businesses are suggested by marketers of using branded paid search campaigns. Is because your competitors will use your branded terms against you.

[00:15:10] Kevin Dieny: So here’s an example, a CRM, if you’re ever looking for a CRM, right? The phrase, CRM stands for customer relationship management software. Now a lot of times people aren’t typing in customer relationship management software, they’re typing in the abbreviated CRM, right? But let’s say someone types in “Salesforce CRM.”

[00:15:30] Kevin Dieny: I guarantee you, you’re not just going to see Salesforce ads. You’re going to see their competitors and the messaging they can put on there. And the page they can send you to, if you click on it. It can be all about Salesforce, but can be comparing possibly them against Salesforce.

[00:15:47] Kevin Dieny: It could be showing off why they’re better than Salesforce. It’s very, it can be very specific, but it still be about Salesforce. And brands, a lot of the time will bid on a competitor’s branded keywords to get an advantage, to get that jump, because it could be that Salesforce has spent a lot of money getting people to get those touches, right.

[00:16:08] Kevin Dieny: To get people ready to go, to buy a CRM. And then right when they’re at that point near the bottom of the funnel to buy that’s what another brand wants to scoop them up and be like, Hey, are you looking at Salesforce? Why don’t you come over here and look at this CRM! So it works really well as a marketer.

[00:16:24] Kevin Dieny: It’s like that, that works. It’s obviously harder to get a higher quality score a higher relevance score and things like that. And your landing page experience may not be as great, but it, it can, you can scoop off some of those people who are potentially at the bottom, but not a hundred percent dedicated on buying Salesforce quite yet.

[00:16:42] Kevin Dieny: If you were a CRM, you know, running these types of campaigns. So think about that for your business. You could put your competitors. Brand terms into campaigns. You can do things like that. That go usually called competitive ads. There you can also group campaigns up, you know, to target each of your competitors, especially if a competitor is big, but isn’t running any ads, then you kind of have the open field to go after their branded terms.

[00:17:12] Kevin Dieny: But another thing that we really need to focus on too, is that a branded campaign doesn’t always work. Sometimes the branded terms are very costly. “Salesforce,” that keyword is probably pretty costly. Uh, so it makes it really expensive if you’re not Salesforce to bid on those keywords. And so in that case, going after Salesforce in skimming off some of it’s bottom of funnel traffic, it could be costly.

[00:17:43] Kevin Dieny: Now it could be more costly to convert your top of funnel to middle, to bottom, and then convert them, right. So you have to kind of weigh all that. But sometimes a branded campaign isn’t a fit, if the branded terms are too costly. If you call yourself Salesforce Plumbing, right. So just randomly making that up here.

[00:18:06] Kevin Dieny: Then it could be that if that going after the term, Salesforce plumbing in your case may just be too expensive because your brand name happens to be shared with a very large company. In those cases, branded campaigns just may not be the best fit for you. It’s rare, but it’s possible. There also could be a branded term that is a product term.

[00:18:30] Kevin Dieny: For instance, a company could be called Best Plumbing, right, or five-star plumbing. Now people may type in things like five star plumbers near me. And that to Google may seem like not a branded search, but there is branded terms that exist for it. So it’s going to make the guess, whether this visitor intends to see the branded one or the non-branded one.

[00:18:55] Kevin Dieny: And in probably a lot of cases, they consider it to be the non-branded one. So it may not be, it may not work for you. And also if you’re, if your brand is called something, if your branded terms are associated with a product, with a different industry altogether, you might have a problem like if you are called Elevator Plumbing, someone typing in elevators and probably not looking for plumbing.

[00:19:17] Kevin Dieny: So things like that, uh, are when it gets a little fuzzy. But if the terms are bringing the type of visitors that you want to convert. If the type of people that you want, right. That are the type of people you want to do business with, that you want to sell your products or services to that you want to provide service to. Are coming in on these terms or keywords.

[00:19:40] Kevin Dieny: Then it has to be a consideration, you know, is it might be costly. It might be difficult to do, but if it’s better than my other campaigns, then maybe this branded campaign has some legs to it. And usually we’re taught, we’re talking about comparing campaigns. We’re talking about comparing marketing against each other.

[00:19:59] Kevin Dieny: You have to kind of compare the last funnel, the last journey, uh, points to compare the campaigns. For instance, if a campaign is bringing in 10,000 visitors and another one is only 50 visitors, you may think, wow, 10,000 way bigger than 50, the 10,000 one must be way better. But if it doesn’t ever convert, right. And the 50 one does, then the 50 one is actually better.

[00:20:29] Kevin Dieny: So the farther you can take your stats down closer to the sale, the better you’ll be able to compare campaigns. You don’t really want to compare campaigns on impressions and clicks and click through rates. Maybe not even on lead gen. It probably is better to compare on sales. Or retention or customer lifetime value, lifetime values.

[00:20:50] Kevin Dieny: Those might be a lot better for comparing campaigns, or channel this channel to that channel, or this source Facebook versus Google ads. You kind of want to compare like the last metrics against each other. There might be a campaigns where they generate a lot of leads, right.

[00:21:08] Kevin Dieny: But then hardly any of those leads are going to buy. So then, is that the campaign’s fault? Is it bringing it in the wrong audience or is that the sales person who’s handling those? There’s a lot of diagnostic things you’d want to do. But starting with the branded paid search campaign is a pretty nice thing to do because you’re usually dealing with people who are closer to the sale, closer to buying.

[00:21:33] Kevin Dieny: You have a pretty. A much easier chance of creating a campaign and knowing whether it’s working or not pretty quickly, because you’re not trying to make topple funnel audiences and then move them through the middle, and then to the bottom. That’s a lot harder to track, especially over a larger span of time.

[00:21:48] Kevin Dieny: Just so everyone knows anything beyond like 14 days these days, if it takes longer than 14 days. Your attribution window, the ability to know, like almost definitively that this person has had seven touches or five touches, it starts to diminish because cookies, because of privacy, because of a lot of factors.

[00:22:09] Kevin Dieny: So the longer your buying process and buying cycle is the harder it will be to prove, you know, that you brought someone in at the top, you did all these touches, and now they’re at the bottom. So that’s why a lot of times marketers, I’m just kind of spilling the secret. Right? A lot of times they start at the bottom, they go to where the audience is the most ready to buy to start their campaigns, because it’s the most easy to prove. Prove that you’ve, you’re having some lift.

[00:22:38] Kevin Dieny: So I think we’ve covered how to understand the benefits of the paid search and the branded paid search campaigns. You kind of know what a branded campaign is. It might be a little fuzzy for your industry or for your business, but I’m sure you can work it out. And then we’ve talked a little bit about how you would experiment with it, right.

[00:22:57] Kevin Dieny: Just to touch because when you create a branded campaign with your keywords and your, and you have your ad group and everything ready to go and you launch it, then it’s okay, is this working. And within the first probably couple of weeks. That’s when you’re going to want to make sure you have the right negative keywords.

[00:23:13] Kevin Dieny: Remember when you, when you’re doing paid search, negative keywords are almost, or if not more important than the keywords you’re targeting. So negative keywords of course, are the exclusion words. If someone types in Bill’s Plumbing, great. But if they type in Bill’s Plumbing in Antarctica, that’s, that’s not good.

[00:23:35] Kevin Dieny: You put in all these words that you, that if people happen to put in there, you actually don’t want to show your ad to them. And those are what negative keywords are. And so with branded terms, I think the negative keyword list can be a lot more manageable, maybe not in all cases, but it makes it easier, right?

[00:23:51] Kevin Dieny: Someone who may not have a ton of campaigns or a lot of experience here, a branded campaign is often the easiest place, best place to start. So you’ve got your campaign going, the first couple of weeks, you’re making sure your negative keywords are right. You’re checking your auction insights to see if there’s competitors showing up in there.

[00:24:09] Kevin Dieny: In case you’re like, ooh, you know, my, some of my branded terms are being shared with my competitors. So I wonder what they’re doing. And so you’re, you’re making tweaks to either your messaging, your keywords, your negative keywords. You may change your, the way the keywords match, right. So a broad keyword is any synonym, any plural, any variation that Google thinks matches with this word it can substitute.

[00:24:31] Kevin Dieny: And so it will show your ad for a lot of funky stuff. So you may want to start a lot of times, I start with phrase and then I work either to broad or it’s a more exact over time, but you set up your branded campaign and you’re going, you’re making your tweaks over time. After about 90 days, it’s usually enough.

[00:24:51] Kevin Dieny: You know, unless obviously sooner you could tell this is working or this is obviously it’s just falling flat. There’s just no traffic or no impressions. At that point, you could decide whether this brand campaign is for you or not. And oftentimes that doesn’t require a ton of money, but the rule of thumb usually, is whatever result you’re after you want about 50 of it every week.

[00:25:13] Kevin Dieny: So if you’re after. If I want, I want to see if this will hit 50 impressions in a week. That’s that could be pretty done pretty quickly, usually. 50 clicks, again, depending on the brand and the impressions and the keywords and stuff that can also be done fairly, you know, within a week, pretty quick now, 50 conversions or 50 landing page visits.

[00:25:33] Kevin Dieny: Sometimes that’s a little more difficult in a week and your budget may have to go up to reflect that, but you can kind of play with it. And every business is a little different, you know what your budget parameters are. So you got this going, you’d experimented with it. And you decide whether, you know, this is making conversions, whether this is making sales, whether you like it or not.

[00:25:52] Kevin Dieny: So one of the huge stats, I would say that tell you that a branded campaign is working is that you’ll see things like the landing page visits are higher. The duration on the landing page is much higher. The other pages they visit well, when they land is higher, the bounce rates will be lower.

[00:26:14] Kevin Dieny: And oftentimes the click-through rates for branded campaigns can be very high. So let’s say you have an ad campaign running and it’s just a non-branded campaign. And it’s like a 3% or 4% click through rate. You, you could potentially see branded campaigns that, that go as high as like 20% click through rates.

[00:26:32] Kevin Dieny: Maybe even higher. I don’t know, but it depends on the brand, but if you’re getting, you know, four or five, 10 X, possibly more clicks from the same traffic, branded campaigns can, can be extraordinary for businesses. Or the other benefit is your cost per click may go down substantially.

[00:26:56] Kevin Dieny: And I say that because if you’re branded terms are actually branded terms to Google as well. Then they will reward you because you have an amazing high quality, like anyone looking for a specific like Salesforce, right? The Salesforce company’s website is all about that. They are that brand, right. So Google is going to say, well, Salesforce is the keyword, but this is a brand and they have a whole website and they’re big.

[00:27:25] Kevin Dieny: So if Salesforce bids on its own Salesforce keyword, it’s probably very cheap compared to what everyone else has to bid on it. And that’s because it’s their branded term, right? Like they kind of have more authority on it. And so if you have any keywords like that, Google will see that, see your authority with it.

[00:27:45] Kevin Dieny: They may even give you a huge cut in the cost per click cost for you relative to your competitors. So if you come in and start bidding on your own keywords, Uh, that are branded especially. Then you could see tiny cost per clicks. It could be from a cent, it could be, you know, whatever it could be, you know, 50 bucks depending on the keyword, but that could be way, way less than your non-branded keywords.

[00:28:10] Kevin Dieny: And so campaigns that fall into the branded category often have the high click rate, the high experience on the landing page through engagement. They also tend to have low costs per click. So you put that together, right? Wow these are cheaper, higher performing. Hmm, so the branded paid search campaigns have a huge advantage in those metrics.

[00:28:32] Kevin Dieny: Now these are all kind of like the entry level metrics, right? Cause you know, impressions, clicks conversions on the page. Not necessarily all lead to sales, but most often, branded terms are associated with your brand in such a way that those audiences are in your bottom of funnel. That they are in your ideal fit category.

[00:28:53] Kevin Dieny: And so they happen to be the right people that you want to talk to. So they tend to convert higher, cheaper, faster, right? This is like the dream audience. The only limit they have is the size, the bottom of funnel, if you think of the funnel, right? It’s that upside down inverted pyramid, the bottom of. The time is the tiniest.

[00:29:16] Kevin Dieny: It’s like a sponge once you’ve squeezed out everyone in that audience, it’s theirs. It kind of doesn’t refill so fast. Unless you have a big engine pumping it down from the middle. And a big engine from the top or some other brand is right. If you enter a very well defined space, They may have a lot -they’re educating, informing, becoming solution aware, helping everyone move from the top, into the top and then into the middle and then to the bottom.

[00:29:43] Kevin Dieny: And so there might be just a lot of people there, but in a lot of cases, you’re the one who’s going to have to, you know, refill that. Especially with branded terms, people may be familiar with like the famous plumber or the famous roofer, the famous, I don’t know any dealership, health care provider around the corner, but not yours yet.

[00:30:03] Kevin Dieny: So they may be using the other brands, uh, branded terms and not yours. Cause they’re just not familiar with you yet. The branded terms, the branded campaigns have these huge advantages. Now here’s some of the requirements let’s say, you’re like, I’m swayed, I’m sold, I’ll run a branded campaign. What do I need to do this? So I’ve kind of highlighted, you need to know your brand. You need to know the brand keywords.

[00:30:27] Kevin Dieny: You can come up with a bunch of them. You create a campaign. I may jump into Google ads to do this Bing Ads, to do this Microsoft ads, whatever it is to do this. Any kind of paid search platform. You jump in there, you make a campaign. Now you’re going to take all your branded keywords you have, and you’re going to want, you’re going to want to do what’s called like a spoke.

[00:30:48] Kevin Dieny: So you put all your keywords in like a list, and then you look at them. This is kind of manual. And you’re going to pull out keywords that are very much the same. So how can we make it a good example out of this? So we’ll go to the plumbing example again. So you may say, okay, these ones have to do with time, like 24 hour immediate emergency, something like that.

[00:31:15] Kevin Dieny: Okay, I put them in this group, these keywords have to do with, with the owner, the name, the, something like that, like Bill Plumbing, Williams Plumbing, things like that, Bill, William. You know, anything like that? This is another category. Another one may be the city locale location. Like Bill’s Plumbing in los Angeles.

[00:31:35] Kevin Dieny: Bill’s Plumber in Los Angeles. So you may group by location. So you’re going to come up with all these groupings until all your keywords are in these groupings. A very homogenous, similar-ness to them. So when you’re looking at these keyword groups, you’re thinking, wow, these all are the same. They all have, they have a lot in common.

[00:31:55] Kevin Dieny: It could be that you just have one. You’re just like, well, all these keywords, you know, they’re just the branded it’s just there’s, just a handful of branded names here. So it’s just one. But if you have groupings, you’re going to want to separate those groupings.

[00:32:07] Kevin Dieny: So you got your keywords and now you’re going to want to make a landing page. The landing page has to be all about those, those for those audiences that are typing in those specific keywords. So anyone who’s typing in Bill’s Plumbing, Los Angeles, you’re going to make that landing page all about the people who would be searching for that.

[00:32:29] Kevin Dieny: And I can’t tell you exactly what they want, but they’re, if they’re in the bottom of the funnel, right. They’re probably looking to buy. They’re probably looking for a plumber. They’re probably looking for a way to contact you. They’re looking for an offer. They’re probably, um, just if they’re typing in your brand name, they’re probably really familiar with you.

[00:32:47] Kevin Dieny: They may jump quicker, if it’s something like, this weekend special offer or a special fall or spring or summer rates. Something, they may jump at stuff like that. You’d have to test all that. Right. And then whatever you’ve decided you’re going to run with in your messaging for that people who are typing that in. That’s what you’ve got to make your landing page all about.

[00:33:10] Kevin Dieny: Then once that’s done, then you look at that landing page when you make your ad copy. And ad copy is what people are going to see in the search result. Usually there’s no images. There can be some images there, but generally just think about what’s your, what’s your headlines going to be and your descriptions going to be.

[00:33:24] Kevin Dieny: So the headline, it’s gotta be something that’s going to catch their attention. Define, make sure that they know for sure this is Bill’s Plumbing. And for the Los Angeles example, you may want to put something about Los Angeles or whatever in the headline. And then you repeat that in the description, make sure it’s very on point, very relevant.

[00:33:41] Kevin Dieny: Anyone who clicks that ad, most likely is not clicking it by accident. Hopefully, happens. But you want to make that ad. So crystal clear. And then when they hit that ad and go to that landing page, you want it to be so confident that they’re at the right place, that they don’t bounce. So you want all everything to be in alignment.

[00:33:59] Kevin Dieny: It’s kind of like put the stars, the planets in alignment, and this campaign will sing a lot better for you. So you won’t have any problems there. So yeah, you’re going to need your brand, the keywords that come off that brand. The landing pages for each individual ad group that you have from your spoke’ing categories, ad copy that matches each unique group, very, very relevant ultra specific messaging.

[00:34:26] Kevin Dieny: So, and then you’re going to need to, you know, a budget for all this. So you may, you may start your budget small, turn it on, see what you learn and then increase it over time. That’s what I do. So start it at some amount where you’re still going to get enough traffic to see if things are working. You’re going to learn from negative keywords, stuff like that.

[00:34:46] Kevin Dieny: And then, you know, you’re ready to roll. Branded campaigns are fantastic. They do, they, you are going to have to monitor brand search campaigns. I would, you know, especially at first check it every day that it’s running. And see if you learn anything right off the bat, right. See if there’s obvious keywords that are not a fit, you’re going to add to your negative list, check your audience insights, to see what other competitors are running up against, who are searching for the same types of things.

[00:35:13] Kevin Dieny: And that’s kinda how it goes. This is what other people recommend that you have branded and non-branded campaigns running simultaneously. I think you can get away with just running a brand new campaign on its own. But that would be really, really slim pickings. That’s just running a bottom of funnel campaign, right?

[00:35:30] Kevin Dieny: It might be a place you start, but it’s not a place you want to be ideally. You want to have they call it the hybrid setup of a non-branded campaign and then another branded campaign. And you don’t want them to bid on the same exact keywords because you kind of a little bit against yourself. So dedicated campaign branded.

[00:35:49] Kevin Dieny: And give it all those branded terms and then dedicate your rest of your campaigns to the non-branded one or non-branded keywords so that you’re not, you know, double, triple bidding on yourself, in that example. Campaigns will bid against themselves within the campaign. The ad groups may not, but you definitely want to drive, try to keep everything as separate as possible.

[00:36:12] Kevin Dieny: That’s why you’re creating different ad groups so that they don’t interfere so that there’s no overlap. And so that they’re hitting a very suscint, very specific relevant message. That’s if I could say that over and over again, I would. But I think you get the point and that’s kind of how you structure your campaigns inside Google Ads or Bing or whatever.

[00:36:31] Kevin Dieny: That’s the ideal way to do it. So how much money do you need? That’s the last requirement? I don’t know. Like I said, the 50 a week example is what’s recommended by most platforms because that’s, when you’re going to get into the extra benefit of more data. So there’s more analysis that can happen, more optimization, more tuning that can occur.

[00:36:52] Kevin Dieny: So that’s usually what I shoot for. And there’s one other thing. When you do this in Google, I think Bing has it too, where you tell it, your bidding type, like, what is your goal? What is your, what are you trying to do here? Brand awareness is not the goal, right? Just to be very clear branded campaigns, the goal is not brand awareness.

[00:37:15] Kevin Dieny: Brand awareness is for people at the very tip top or in the middle to know who you are, right to who are unaware. That’s who they’re for. Whereas the bottom of funnel is people who are definitely are aware. They thereafter hunting for a solution right now. So this is not that goal. The goal is probably either going to be impression share so that you can get a lot of the searches for it.

[00:37:40] Kevin Dieny: You get a lot more of that share of impressions. Or it’s going to be number one position you can bid for that, or it’s going to be clicks. It it’s possible that you may go for conversions, but sometimes when you’re starting out, you may not want to start with the go after conversions bidding type, because the campaign is going to optimize for conversions.

[00:38:04] Kevin Dieny: And you’re going to spend the first couple of weeks or months just tuning the campaign. So it may not be optimal quite yet. And you can switch the bidding type, but usually impression share, rank top one position, or maximize clicks is usually where I go with in the bidding. Uh, this is my, where I’m going.

[00:38:28] Kevin Dieny: Now, let’s say you’re, you’re a couple of weeks in and you’re like, okay, I want to audit this. Make sure it’s running well. Look for low impressions, look for keywords again that are not the right fit. If you’re running at a budget, that’s telling you that you have some keywords, especially if you have a keyword, that’s soaking up all the impressions or all the clicks.

[00:38:45] Kevin Dieny: You may want to break that keyword up. So let’s say you have one keyword and you have, let’s say there’s 50, but you have one keyword that has all the like 99% of the impressions and clicks consider that if it’s like a two tail, meaning there’s two words in that keyword, Bill’s Plumbing. Consider, well, let’s add a keyword or two or three or four to it.

[00:39:07] Kevin Dieny: Maybe look at your search terms, report. Look in there to see what other keywords could you add to the Bill’s Plumbing, you know, to get it to be a better match. And it could be Bill’s Plumbing, Los Angeles. It could be Bill’s Plumbing, 24-hour. Bill’s Plumbing, drains. Bill’s Plumbing repair. You know, if you’re add another word to it, it can

[00:39:29] Kevin Dieny: lower the impressions, but it can make it much more specific what people are looking for. So that’s a little strategic and a little, not a hundred percent of the time it will work. But if you have all the impressions being soaked up by one keyword, it’s usually not ideal. And it kind of tells you, you need to break it up.

[00:39:48] Kevin Dieny: If you have too low of impressions. You just your branded keywords just aren’t carrying the weight. There’s just not enough people searching for it. Right. That tells you that your brand is just not, it’s not popular. It’s not people aren’t searching for it. So are there keywords that people are searching for now?

[00:40:07] Kevin Dieny: If you, if you’re like, yes. And they’re branded, add them in, right. Or create a new ad group for them. If the answer’s no. They’re not branded, then that’s a non-branded campaign. And non-branded campaigns typically have that wonderful virtue of having tons of more impressions that you can go after, so that you don’t have that problem in there.

[00:40:25] Kevin Dieny: Now, obviously those people could be in the top of the middle of the funnel. So you lose that quality part, but you get the quantity, right? Like I mentioned in the beginning. Now there’s other things too, like if your budget’s running out, look at the time of day that your ads are running and spending money, you may want to tighten the times that the ads are running so that they’re only running when you’re in business.

[00:40:46] Kevin Dieny: Midnight may not be when people are answering the phones anyway, uh, it could be that your ads are running, not even close to where your business is or does business. If you’re a business that does, you know, only local and your ads running in a state, four states away, soaking up budget, probably a waste.

[00:41:06] Kevin Dieny: Tighten things like that, your time of day, your locations. If your keywords are broad, maybe, and they’re getting too many, your budgets running out, consider changing them to phrase or exact, because that will lower your impressions, but increase the quality generally. So let’s see, what other things that people that come up?

[00:41:29] Kevin Dieny: Oh yeah, so quality score. After your campaigns run for a while. Google’s going to say, okay, you thought these are branded terms, didn’t you? This is what happens. And it could be that some of the terms you’re using happen to be non-branded to Google. In which case you may see. The landing page experience, when people get there is low.

[00:41:52] Kevin Dieny: Meaning when people get there, they don’t do anything, they leave, they bounce. So that’s going to destroy your landing page experience, which is one element of the quality score that Google has. Another thing that might be happening is the click through rates just aren’t as good. And you’re like, well, why is that?

[00:42:05] Kevin Dieny: That could be your copy. I could be your terms. It could be a lot of things. You have this, maybe they’re non-branded terms. But sometimes I look at the copy for that, um, first to see if like my ad is conveying the right message for this type of person who’s searching for this keywords. And then it could be fixed right there and then the relevance.

[00:42:27] Kevin Dieny: So all of that right. Comes into play right as the landing page relevant is the ad copy relevant to the keywords, it all has to be aligned. In which case it could lower your quality score. If you’re looking at your keywords, it’ll tell you quality score at a rank 1 to 10. Now, anything below six is probably, if it doesn’t have a lot of impressions, it probably just needs more time or generally, or if it is getting impressions, it’s probably anchoring your campaign down.

[00:42:59] Kevin Dieny: That means that the campaign is not performing as well, because Google doesn’t think you’re a good fit for those keywords. It doesn’t think you’re relevant. It doesn’t think you have anything to do with those keywords, that you can’t have anyone who has, who types that in, you’re not a good fit for helping them.

[00:43:11] Kevin Dieny: So either you have to make a new ad group for them dedicated specifically for those keywords. You should prove to Google, yes, I can. And here I’m going to take an extra push to do it. Or you just have to remove them, pause them, remove them from your campaign. Cause they’re just weighing you down.

[00:43:25] Kevin Dieny: Think of it like the six month goal, is to have a campaign with ad groups that have keywords that have high quality scores that have high click rates, low cost per clicks, high landing page experience, and that you’re converting and that you’re selling.

[00:43:44] Kevin Dieny: That’s the goal. Yeah, there’s a lot of parts there, a lot of pieces there to, to focus on, um, to get it right. And the last thing I’ll talk about is the extensions with branded paid search. Yeah, jam extensions in there, but they, every extension you may want to consider adding extensions that fit the branding campaign element. Even extensions need to be relevant.

[00:44:12] Kevin Dieny: Right, or Google’s just not going to show them. So make sure that anything you’re putting in there are relevant. If you’re going to put a call number, extension. I’m speaking from experience, and we’re a call tracking company. Sometimes the people who see a phone number right on the screen, will just call it right away. And if you, if your keywords are bringing in people who are not quality, you’re sometimes going to just get a ton of phone calls that have nothing to do with your business.

[00:44:41] Kevin Dieny: And it’s a ton of waste of time. Phone calls are great, but they are costly, right? You want to make sure that these callers are not wasting your time. Right, if you, if you have to weed through 10 calls, just to get to a good one, that’s a huge waste of time. So it’s not always the case to put extensions in. So think thoughtfully, right.

[00:45:01] Kevin Dieny: But put extensions in, generally, as long as you’ve thought it through and it makes sense for this campaign, put them in and then over time, if you realize they’re not working, you can always remove them. And it’s no skin off your back. So let’s just recap everything. The advantages of a branded paid search campaign are vast.

[00:45:24] Kevin Dieny: They can often be higher performing, lower cost, more efficient, generate your goals that you’re after conversions or sales at a much better efficiency than any other campaign that I know of because they’re targeting the bottom of funnel audience. That audience that typically has a much better fit, much higher purchase intent, is ready to go.

[00:45:45] Kevin Dieny: So it’s the marketing dream, right? It’s the sales dream of being able to talk to just the people who are lined up in line, ready to buy. Right? So there’s a lot of benefits there. There’s the opportunities for your business there? I think you should take a look at this. See if a branded campaign isn’t already running.

[00:46:03] Kevin Dieny: If it isn’t consider running it right. If it is running, look at it again, evaluate it, see if it can be improved. Experiment with it and make sure you’re tracking your conversions. Make sure you’re tracking everything in marketing. Otherwise it’s pointless to run it because you don’t know whether it’s doing well.

[00:46:18] Kevin Dieny: If I should put more budget in it or if I should take budget and put it somewhere else. You want a very vast margin of profit from this and it’s gotta make sense. No one wants to spend money, that’s just wasted here. Where it’s gotta make sense. Branded campaigns often do make sense, but you still want to know.

[00:46:34] Kevin Dieny: The end of the day, what’s working, what’s not. And then let them make sure your campaigns are running for a good length of time so that the results are large enough that you can be confident enough in whether it’s working or not. If it’s something you’ve tried in the past and you’re like, it never worked.

[00:46:48] Kevin Dieny: I had an agency do it. I had people do it. It’s just never worked something about it didn’t work. That that doesn’t necessarily mean that it will never work. It’s just worth considering again, whether it’s going to be for you and your business. I think I’ve tackled and covered a lot of this.

[00:47:04] Kevin Dieny: If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me. I’m on LinkedIn. You can find us on the web, on our webpage. You can ask me about branded campaigns. If you need any help with it, I also do a consulting for this, so I’ve run into a lot of accounts that have quite a lot of branded campaigns.

[00:47:20] Kevin Dieny: I can sniff them out. I can help them work better than they are. So anything like that? Let me know again, thank you for listening. I really appreciate it. I’m excited to talk about this stuff. This is an episode I’m doing solo because it’s just a passionate topic. I love the paid search channel. So again, thank you.

[00:47:39] Kevin Dieny: And I’ll see you again. Next time.