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Brand Bidding – Is It Right For You?Benchmark Search Conference

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Who are icelolly.com?

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A bit about icelolly.com

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As seen on TV!

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What we’ll cover today

Our journey at icelolly.com

How we’ve tested

Next steps for you

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Show of hands

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Who bids on their brand?

YAY/NAY?

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It’s a contentious issue!

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So, is it right for you?

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… it depends!

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Go nuclear!

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Why do we keep pushing it?

• Incremental gains

• Competitor protection

• Tactical messaging

• Testing potential

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…but honestly?

It makes us look good

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…but honestly?

Higher Conversions

Lower CPAs

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Our journey at icelolly.com

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Our story so far

Bidding on all but some very broad KWs with no competitor activity

Previous testing had delivered mixed results

However, organic converted better than paid search

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We thought we’d excluded some terms…

• A navigational keyword was excluded in July 2015

• Yet we still only had 17% organic CTR

• Google treats “ “ and “.” as the same & matched traffic to a similar KW instead

• Variations didn’t show correctly in SQRs

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How we’ve tested

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We started off with a theory

That there could there be a third way…

…based on user intent

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Other considerations

User IntentCompetitor

PresenceTactical

Messaging

Message Testing

Flexibility Incrementality?

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Assigning intent & value

• We broke keywords into segments (including misspellings)

Exact

• thomas cook

• expedia

Navigational

• thomson.com

• onthebeachcom

• icelolly website

Destinations

• sunmastertenerife

• icelolly from glasgow

Holiday Types

• icelolly cruise

• icelolly ski

• icelolly all inclusive

NOT OFFERED

• icelolly flights only

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Our theory

• Intent-dependent, brand should be a mix of paid and organic

• Broadly put:

Homepage/easily crawled: SEO

Search results: PPC

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Our theory - outcome

• Caveats:

– No competitor activity

– No TV sponsorship or advertising

Exact

Navigational

Destinations

Holiday Types

NOT OFFERED

Don’t Bid

BID

BID

Don’t Bid

Don’t Bid

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Our challenges

• [not provided]

• GA SEO/Direct reporting issue

• Adwords “close variant” matching

• Account structure

• Competitor bidding

• Tying up calls and traffic

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What would our process be?

Systematic

1 keyword at a time, engine at a time

Monitor impressions, clicks, CTR

Nail down Adwords negative keywords & restructure

Competitor intelligence

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Hitlist of keywords

1. Check GSC

2. High impressions + low CTR = high potential!

3. Check against PPC

4. Check competitor bidding

5. Create a hitlist of terms to test

6. Keep checking this as it can change!

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Hitlist of keywords

1. Check GSC

2. High impressions + low CTR = high potential!

3. Check against PPC

4. Check competitor bidding

5. Create a hitlist of terms to test

6. Keep checking this as it can change!

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So what happened?

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Organic Traffic went up!

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Visible in both GSC & Adwords

Traffic appeared to migrate entirely to organic

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Interesting effect on other keywords

• Other terms benefited

• Brand terms we weren’t testing showed increases in:

Listings per query

CTR – up by 10% points

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What about calls?

• Very difficult to know definitively

• Either flat, or very small loss

• Any missing calls at a very high incremental cost

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And then…

• We went back on TV!

• Turned on more keywords than before

• Lack of call clarity testing confidence

• Competitor concerns

• Lack of comparable YoY data

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What’s next for us?

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Up next…

• Resume testing

• Start with the status quo – get back to last year – pause “new” terms

• Follow the same process – review the KW in our target list

• Find ways to be more responsive with competitor activity – more flexibility – scripts etc

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Next steps for you

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How to run your own test

1. Review current paid keywords, negatives & structure

2. Pull an SQR – categorise them & assign intent/value

3. Review competitor landscape

4. What’s your hypothesis/ideal outcome?

5. Create your target test list

6. Devise methods to validate your results

7. Test one-by-one and move on!

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Thank you!