Following on today’s post on the Microsoft Advertising Blog, New Whitepaper: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Digital Advertising for Brand Campaigns, today I’m going to address some best practices for incorporating your brand into your search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns on adCenter.

Without a doubt, one of the reasons SEM is such an attractive advertising method is its transparency in tracking return-on-investment (ROI); simply compare what you’re making in sales to what you’re paying in clicks.  But what about when your focus is not sales, but increased brand awareness?

While it’s a common practice to create separate campaigns by their sales versus branding intent, the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive.  You can address both in a single campaign by way of fine tuning your ads to ensure that your brand is highly visible, which can result in your ads earning a solid click-through rate (CTR), and hopefully, high conversions.

Below are some tips to help your brand shine through.

KEYWORDS: Bid on all brand keywords

This may seem as though it should go without saying, but with budgets tightening across the board, many advertisers are content with letting the organic listings be the only entry point for internet users to find them.  While this can be an effective method for reigning in costs, it could also diminish your chances of catching a user’s eye and motivating them to visit your site with specific, targeted ad copy that provides more detailed information on what they’re looking for than the text that appears with the organic listing.  If you don’t already have a brand campaign in your account, consider adding one with all brand-related terms and misspellings.

NOTE: If you find that a competitor is bidding on your trademarked terms, review my previous post, Is a Competitor Bidding on Your Trademark? to find out how to address this issue.

ADS: Highlight your brand and make it "official"

While the below tips are particularly helpful for ads that focus on brand, they can be applied to all ads in your campaign:

1.) Although most special characters are stripped out in the keyword normalization process,  the trademark symbol (™) and copyright symbol (©) are not affected and should absolutely be used whenever possible to instill confidence in the user; it tells them your ad will bring them to the official site, or a site officially partnering with the brand.  On a related note, the word “official” typically helps improve overall CTR on ads that use it, so if you’re authorized to include this information in your ads, do it.

DISPLAY URL: Use dynamic text to insert your brand

Per the normalization process, capitalization is stripped away from both keywords and display URLs.  There is a way around it if you use parameters to insert the text the way you want it to appear in your ads.

Assuming you’re utilizing dynamic text elsewhere in your ad (Param1 in your ad title, Param2 in your destination URL), put the display URL as you want it to appear in in the Param3 column, for example: www.MySpiffyBrand.com.

For more information on what dynamic text is and how to use it in your ads, visit the list of posts that have been tagged with “dynamic text”.

Having a well-known brand can give you a competitive edge in your SEM campaigns, if you’ve got it, flaunt it!

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