Download - Brand Bidding - Is It Right For You? - Benchmark Search Conference 2016 - Arianne Donoghue
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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
Don’t 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!