Lazy Search Marketers, Prepare to be Called out!
Here’s a quick quiz: what are the easiest keywords to win in both SEO and paid search campaigns? What are the toughest keywords to win in SEO and the most expensive to buy in PPC? This isn’t a trick question and the answers are obvious: your company’s or client’s brand name keywords should always be the easiest to win, and the two or three keyword generic phrases are always the toughest. So why do some SEO’s and PPC campaign managers think last click attribution should give them unearned credit on brand names? Could it be laziness?
Don’t pull the wool over my eyes…
I hate it when people aren’t forthcoming. Almost 99% of the time brand name keywords, product keywords, trademarked terms, and the like are the easiest wins in SEO and paid search campaigns. Why? Usually, your company will have a straightforward URL, easy name recognition, existing branding exposure, and site mechanics good enough for engines to rank your website’s homepage (at least).
For the 1% of those companies out there with very generic names that could point to a number of competitors in an industry, I regret to inform you that you might have to get creative, or ask search engines for help. Long-standing brands such as “American Airlines” can sometimes be misunderstood when paired with extra keywords in a search query. Stuff happens!
Paid search campaigns are no different. Search engines still allow certain trademarks and brand marks to be protected from global usage, but more importantly, relevance and quality score will assist your paid campaigns to achieve the highest rank and lowest CPC for branded keywords. If not, ask for exceptions from the search engines, they all have people that can help.
Last click attribution has to die
It’s wonderful when a campaign drives a first time user to a site and that same user is influenced enough from the initial landing page to convert on the spot. But how many times does that actually happen? It depends on a lot of factors, but you’re more likely to see Haley’s Comet. That’s the problem with last click campaign attribution models – usually it takes more than that to convert a visitor.
When you start thinking about all the factors that influence a person to convert on your site, you quickly realize that attributing success to the last click is flawed:
- Does your offline/traditional marketing counterpart run ads in newspapers, trade magazines, and sponsorship placements? If so, your branding keywords start looking better.
- Do you have sales representatives that take clients out to lunch, or appear at trade shows, or cold-call prospects? First, you fail, shame on you for making sales reps cold call. Second, sales reps are great at putting your name out there. Hey, look at that, your trademarked keywords look good around the time of that trade show!
- Do some of your own paid search campaigns suffer from high bounce rate, or severely latent conversions? What are the chances someone within an organization does the research and another actually purchases something? Pretty good, I’d say. Wait, did your branding keywords just jump in ROI again?
You see? It’s not magic.
Everyone loses, because you phoned it in…
Way to go, numb nuts!
A ton of factors can be driving your branding keywords to high conversion rates; through SEO and through paid search. In the examples above, you’ve just marginalized your traditional marketing team, your sales team, and even your own paid search campaigns by giving into the laziness that is last-click attribution.
For shame.
Don’t pull the plug on branding, just de-emphasize it
Of course I’m not telling you to turn off branding campaigns, or to stop bidding on your own trademarked terms, because they do play their part in the overall conversion process. Just don’t stake your reputation on convincing others that winning those terms in a SEO overhaul or paid search campaign was a big deal. At best, if they weren’t already on top of it, setting up those easy wins are provided as a bonus to your clients. Nothing more, nothing less.
