Paint or Potato Chips?

by Kevin Freemore on 06/22/2009 at 5:27 pm in Brand Management, PPC, PPC Strategies

Do a search for “eating paint chips” and take a look at how many paid search ads come up. There’s an ad for Healthy All-Natural chips, which you might want to consider if you really are interested in eating Kelly-Moore Latex Sour Cream and Onions. There are also a number of well known paint companies that are advertising and hopefully not intending for their brand of paint to be used as a snack. And who knows–there may come a day when paint is flavored and non-toxic. Glue is ok to eat now, right? Anyway, you get the idea. It took me a whole minute to find an example of this, and believe me, there were plenty more that were way worse. Now, ask yourself a few questions. What does this do to my search performance and what does it do to my brand image?

As brand owners, we wouldn’t think about putting our brand alongside something with a negative connotation, but in PPC, it happens every day. In fact, you could argue that it’s impossible to avoid completely. However, paid search mismatches can be greatly reduced with a few basic strategies every agency should be implementing.

Broad Match and Search Query Reports:

What broad match means for those of you who are unfamiliar with the lingo is that your search query will match to “similar phrases and relevant variations”. For example bidding on “chips” on broad match will allow you to show up for terms such as“Paint chips”, “potato chips”, “poker chips” and “chips TV series”. Extended broad match in Google will further allow you to show up for things like “Erik Estrada”. As you can see it can be very dangerous to bid solely on broad match, especially without an extensive list of negatives and other match types to support it.

Solution: Google gives you the ability to run Search Query Reports which show you the exact queries you are matching to. If we pulled one for a paint brand, we would see things like “eating” in the search query report and know we needed to add it as a negative keyword. Think of a negative keyword as the opposite of a keyword. It’s something you don’t want to show up for, like a C-SPAN fan club meeting or a really awkward party. Negative broad matching of the word “eating” would ensure that you won’t show up for any search query that contains the word “eating.”

Utilize exact match once you have narrowed the keywords you want to show up for. Exact matching will allow you to show for EXACTLY what the search query type in is. So, if you want to show up for “Paint Chips” you will not show up for anything that contains other search variations such as “eating paint chips”. This will not only make sure you are targeting your creative correctly, but it will also often result in a lower CPC and a higher conversion rate. Obviously, people searching for “eating paint chips” are either looking up movie quotes from Tommy Boy or the phone number for the poison control center.

Brand Image:

While it’s costly to inadvertently appear for terms you don’t want to be associated with, there are farther-reaching implications. When someone is searching for “eating paint chips” and your handcrafted kettle chip brand appears, what do you think that consumers are going to think or associate with your brand?

If you work with an agency ask them about this. If you don’t, make sure this is part of your strategy.