Paid Search: Brand Keywords Need Their Own Campaign

Posted in Paid Search. Written by Justin Freid on March 23rd, 2010

Campaign structure can play a large role in the success of paid search marketing effort. As any search marketer knows, we are often knee deep in data and the tough part if shifting through the non-converting keywords, bounce rates and click through rates. By setting up your paid search account in affective way can help you monitor your most successful terms, increase conversions and make smart decisions based on precise data.

Theoretically, your brand keywords often convert at a higher rate than your non-brand keywords. If someone is searching for your brand they are already further along in the purchasing process then someone who is searching at the product level.  Due to the unusual high conversion rates, click through rates and other skewed data it can often alter the data provided at the campaign level. This skewed data could affect your decision making process.

By setting up your branded keywords in their own campaign it allows you to not only monitor your branded terms more carefully it provides you with clearer and more precise data of your non-branded keywords. With so much of the data in Adwords and MSN’s paid search interface coming in the form of averages it is important to make sure the data points included in your data set are relevant and as segmented as possible.

Using averages to makes decisions produces average results, so take some time to move your branded keywords into their own campaign so you can make more strategic decisions on data sets that truly present the performance of your SEM efforts.