• Make sure to allocate appropriate budgets and include promotional messaging on key shopping days like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Green Monday
• Incorporate the spirit of the holidays in all marketing channels, including the Web site
• Create unique landing pages for Holiday Gift Guides and Specials
• Test marketing messaging and offers to see which resonate best with your audience
• Be relevant to your consumers and personalize when possible

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.

There are two main ways of looking at the value of branded paid search:

1. It does not make sense to run branded search if you have strong organic rankings for your brand because your organic listings will pick up that traffic and conversion. Why pay for something that you can get for free?
2. People who search for a brand term are often in a research mindset rather than a purchasing mindset, and with paid search ads you can present these potential customers with a much more compelling offer and land them on the ideally optimized page to convert traffic. Your conversion rate and total site conversions will be higher if you run a well executed brand paid search campaign. Also, if you don’t bid on brand terms than competitors who bid on your brand terms are more likely to steal traffic and revenue from you.

For the test we are trying to figure out how to maximize our paid search spend in terms of generating total conversions. We have seen that our non-brand search spend has a tremendous impact on the organic traffic and revenue of this particular client. We don’t care who gets credit for the conversion that comes through; we are only concerned about maximizing conversions as a whole. Therefore, our goals for the brand test are to:

• Understand whether we should be running branded paid search terms
• Figure out how to truly maximize site bookings for a given budget
• Better understand the relationship between paid search and natural traffic and conversions

To hopefully accomplish these goals we are running a period of true non-brand search (with the true brand term set as a negative keyword) followed by a period of full branded paid search. We plan to keep spend levels perfectly constant between the two periods and monitor total conversions through Omniture. We are going to ignore Bluestreak paid search data entirely and look at combined organic and paid conversions. The period with higher conversions wins.

Of course, there are many variables that can throw off our results: holidays, conversion window, organic search trends, paid search competitors, etc. There is no way that we can run a perfect test. Our hope is that something will really jump out at us though and we can feel confident coming to some conclusion.

Right now, we are in the middle of our test. We are running just non-brand. In a few weeks we are going to run full force brand and compare results between the two periods. We are eager to see how the test turns out and get back to the client with our recommendation as to whether or not they should be running branded paid search.