Search marketing is an important lever when it comes to advertising on your brand. Search enables you to track the return on your advertising investment when you want sales, but it is also a very powerful tool when thinking about brand awareness.
Although sometimes it may seem so, your focus doesn’t have to be about either sales or brand awareness; there is a way to combine both. By fine tuning your ads, you can make sure the brand shows and your ads have a great click-through rate (CTR).
Bid on all your brand keywords
Online advertising is all about offering different points of entry to the customer. Some advertisers bet on the organic results to show up when their brand is queried. They think that the money that is spent on SEO should cover these queries and that there is no need to increase their online branding costs by bidding on the brand keywords. I totally understand this point of view, but users don’t always look at the organic results when they seem to have a very relevant ad showing at the top.
Bidding on your brand keywords has different positive results on your online strategy:
- More entry points for potential customers
- A very catchy official ad at the top of the results
- An increase in the average CTR of your account (always good for the overall performance of the account).
Consider adding a “Brand" campaign to your account, making sure to include all brand-related keywords and their misspellings. If you notice one of your competitors bidding on your trademarked terms, you can protect your brand by submitting a request for our teams to investigate the issue – for more information, visit the page that’s most relevant to your location: US, Canada (EN - FR), UK, France, Singapore.
Highlight your brand in your ads
Now that your ads appear when users search for your brand keywords, you need to make sure your ads will reflect the fact that it is YOUR brand ! These best practices can be applied to all ad groups, not only the branded ones as they add a lot of value to your ads.
™ and ©: Powerful characters
Don't hesitate to use the Trademark symbol as well as the Copyright symbol in your ads following your brand or product names. This will bring confidence to the user before clicking on the ad. It will confirm that it links to the an official site, or site officially partnering with the brand.
Official site: Say so!
You also shouldn't be afraid of claiming your official status. Get out there, claim it; your ad represents the official site! The word 'official' improves the CTR of your ad, so don’t be afraid of using it.
Make sure your URL displaysYOURbrand:
You might be wondering: “Is there a way to use capital letters in my display URL in order to make sure my brand shows ?”
Yes, there is!
When uploading the display URLs, our tool normalizes them, resulting in everything showing up as lower case when the ad appears on adCenter. The way around this normalization is to utilize parameters in your display URLs.
Here is my trick: When creating my ad list, the display URLs that I input are {param3}.
Note: I usually use Param1 for the title (or both title and description), Param2 for the destination URLs, and therefore I only have Param3 left for the Display URL.
Then, I put my display URL in my Param3 column i.e.: www.TheyLoveMe.com.
For more information on using parameters (a.k.a dynamic text), visit the Dynamic Text category for a list of posts that have been tagged as containing information related to this popular ad copy best practice.
Having a well-known brand can be a huge asset in your SEM campaigns -- by following these simple tips and tricks, you'll be well on your way to making your brand work for you!
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