Alice in Wonderland and a nerd marketers' rabbit hole.

Some key themes in The Matrix movie are questioning one's reality, awakening from dreams and having independent thinking. Neo is our Alice, following a white rabbit to discover a world beyond his own perceived reality.

Matrix has plenty of references, both subtle and explicit, to Alice in Wonderland.

Today we mention something that most brands do, i.e. spending money on search ads to be visible on Google for their own brand. We will do it from the cover-sweetened story down to a rabbit hole I fell into many times.

This newsletter is called the Red Pill and according to the infamous Matrix quote “You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

So let's scratch the surface together of this rabbit hole for marketers called SEM Brand.

I still remember when back in 2012 I worked in the marketing team at Google and we communicated to brands the opportunity to advertise on their own brand keywords.

I mean, saying to Gucci that it can spend one million euros every year to be more visible on its own brand keyword "Gucci" might not be an easy pitch.

However, some things make sense at first sight.

The (dumb) last-touch click attribution ROAS is amazing.

And this should be also quite intuitive. As a company you probably made a lot of effort to build your reputation and awareness, so those people actively searching for your brands are likely to be very interested in buying something from you.

Moreover, you have to defend your brand and be visible to these people rather than let some sneaky competitors be there in your place, right?

Yes, that's right at first sight.

But, the but is a pretty big BUT, fast-forward 10 years lots of brands bid on Google on their own brand keywords (we call this SEM Brand), but unfortunately very few deal with it in the best way.

A small brand can spend 10k€ on SEM Brand every year

A big brand can spend even 100x that amount. Lots of money.

Here are 5 things I did with SEM Brand across a large spectrum of company sizes and industries, from giants like Expedia down to mom-and-pop fashion brands.

1) Awareness measurement

Awareness activities often drive people to search more, but organic data to measure this effect is terrible.

Measuring performance uplift on awareness and intent has lots of partial data to deal with too, so I willingly used SEM Brand to improve the data quality of this effect and measure better my awareness activities' impact.

Google Ads metrics from impressions to clicks are very accurate, so if you want to measure discrepancies in percentage points in a pre/post or A/B or whatever other testing way, that's a handy sample of data to have even if you needed to spend few bucks on it.

2) Go deep on your competition set

Are there 10 competitors bidding like hell every day on your brand, or only a couple of them?

Do they do it constantly or just once in a while? If they do it infrequently, do you see a pattern (e.g. sales season, Christmas, when they have promotions, etc.)?

Do you think they have large pockets, or they probably don't even know they are there visible on your brand keyword?

According to how you answer the above questions you can act very differently to optimize the money you spend on SEM brand.

You can for example create a script that reactively makes you visible as soon as a competitor is visible, and stops spending as soon as the competitor goes away.

You can even try to bid to be second in the auction in an attempt to drive your competitor's cost as high as possible if you think that traffic is unlikely to produce a good output for him. This can increase the likelihood that your competitor will notice this cost item pop out in its marketing report and decide to do something with it, perhaps reducing or eliminating his bidding on your brand altogether because it's simply not worth it.

Perhaps your competitor is interested specifically in some cities or days, so you can make sure you spend in these cases while saving on all other ones.

Etc. Etc.

3) Traffic incrementality

If you stop doing ads on SEM Brand, how much traffic comes to you anyway through SEO Brand?

This is an easy question, but estimating it precisely is going to be the real trick.

I tried different methodologies and tools overtime to make the best estimate. This is because when you have some competitors this estimate is going to be decisive in the deciding how important it is to keep bidding.

The solution is a mix of Google Analytics, Google Seach Console as well as some 3rd party independent tools to triangulate information. These are the ingredients, the chef's formula is on you. :D

4) Output incrementality

Okay, let's say that when you switch off SEM Brand spend you know that 100% of the SEM Brand traffic shifts to your SEO Brand traffic, should you go ahead and cut the spend?

It depends on how well this SEO Brand traffic becomes your desired output (e.g. sales). SEM Brand landing pages can be varied (sitelinks) and much more optimized for Conversion Rate in comparison to your general homepage SEO-ranked URL.

You might save 200.000€ per year by not bidding on SEM Brand and letting all the traffic flow to your website anyway through SEO Brand, but if you lose 1 million in revenues due to a lower Conversion Rate then it's probably worth it to keep it anyway.

5) Act smart

Flag competitors for copyright and misleading ads?

Check multiple zip-code locations with hourly frequency to infer your competitor's bidding strategy and counter-act methodically?

"Signal" to your competitor that you don't like it and perhaps it doesn't even make sense for them from an economic standpoint since you could bid on their brand too? :S

Resellers often want the right to advertise with ads including your brand keywords. This is often negotiable and you might even prepare some data to back up your interests. It's not always valuable for them to do it. Perhaps you could do a little test with a collaborative reseller and sharing all cost and revenues data to determine whether it makes sense for them from a profit point of view, or it makes sense for your brand because it's not a simple zero-sum game where you share the same finite amount of sales. In fact, your reseller might actually be much better converting than you.

Or maybe your reseller converts better, but by simply diverting your brand-interested users towards other products. It can get complicated too. ;)

All in all, this requires some nicely coordinated marketing, analytics, and technical work.

But if you spend on SEM Brand more than 50.000€/year it's likely worth it.

You can even ask for some custom-built marketing suite, that's something I had to do sometimes too.