How to avoid Excessive Spend on Brand Generic Terms
Last month we announced the launch of our award-winning technology Seamless Search, and explored the ways in which the one-of-a-kind search management platform can enable marketers to manage their paid and organic search holistically.
Search marketing is fundamental to the success of most businesses. Yet despite its importance, most advertisers still don’t know the true value of their activity. With approximately $332 billion being spent on paid advertising – without advertisers understanding the true value of search – one has to wonder what percentage of that is unnecessary spend.
Each year an excessive amount of capital is spent on AdWords, particularly for brand and brand generic terms. Data research from 2018 shows that on average, advertisers (in profitable industries) spend over $2 billion dollars annually on branded search – an astounding figure, which will only have increased in the last two years.
We’ve seen brands paying close to £200 for certain terms, with the most expensive branded keywords (UK) being ‘Ikea Alex desk’ for £191.65, ‘BT Broadband Business’ for £163.60 and ‘Fire Amazon’ for £117.96. With advertisers practically throwing money at Google for brand generic terms, one has to ask, do these businesses really need to spend this much? Wouldn’t it be better for all if paid ads were only served when they were needed, and only when they delivered incremental value over organic traffic? Branded search should be floating your boat, not sinking your ship…
How Seamless Search can Help
Ludicrous though it may seem, advertisers are constantly outbidding competitors for paid spots (even when the consumer searches for a brand by name), for fear of being knocked down the SERP. The cost of bidding on one’s own brand generic terms, is steadily burgeoning and the use of a coordinated marketing campaign, in which organic and paid search are managed together holistically could reap rewards in both business expenditure and ROI.
If businesses had a tool that recognised and implemented bid adjustments to secure top spots, reduced spend on positions already covered organically, and re-invested these savings into other channels then that would be a real game changer.
Here is where Seamless Search comes into action. Seamless Search gives advertisers confidence that they are maximising performance from their search marketing by enabling them to understand exactly how much their paid strategy cannibalises their organic strategy and vice-versa.
The Process
Using machine learning, the platform assesses thousands of internal and external factors that impact the correlation between your paid and organic search, determining the true value of each channel.
To do this four separate reports are loaded into Seamless Search (keyword, ad group, campaign and search term) and the technology goes through the following stages:
- The data goes through a processing procedure (normalises, cleans, filters and splits data to be compatible with our software)
- The data goes through a bid volatility analysis and enters the learning stage (this takes between 4 and 6 weeks)
- Keywords/Devices are then grouped by characteristics (such as impressions, impression share, CTR, CPC and max CPC)
- Model creation through regression prediction (Gradient Boosting on Decision Tree)
- The data is processed via Python
- An optimum bid calculation is made and stored in BigQuery
- Changes are applied to your account via API, and you bids are fully automated through Seamless Search
Once the platform has your data, it can automatically make paid search bid adjustments to optimise and achieve incremental revenue. If you have a high organic coverage, then Seamless Search will recognise this and adjust your bid accordingly, thereby reducing the risk of wasted expenditure whilst allowing you to reinvest your savings into other channels.
Don’t let brand spend dominate your budget – manage your search marketing activity with confidence, and ensure that capital is spent in areas that drive true value.
To find out how Seamless Search could support your business, and drive effective investment decisions, request a free true search projection today.
Seamless Search. Search seen differently.
