Jeff Edwards
Internet Marketing Specialist
The rewards of having a well known brand name are obvious. A well executed brand strategy can make your company much more recognizable and trusted by consumers. This can pay off when it comes to sales, and can lead to a huge ROI for your company. Chances are if you work for one of these recognizable brands you and everyone who came before you have spent countless hours building up a very valuable brand name. Unfortunately having a strong brand just makes you a bigger target in the online marketing/advertising world. Right now, both employees and competitors are finding ways to capitalize on your hard work so it’s time to educate yourself on how to Police your brand on PPC and fight back.
Affiliate programs can be a great source for low cost conversions and further extend your reach. What you don’t know is that your affiliates are probably utilizing your brand name or long tail branded keywords in a PPC account. Now instead of getting a very cheap branded conversion in your PPC account you are going to pay a more expensive commission to your affiliate program. Additionally your ad could be showing at the same time as your Affiliates driving up your CPC by competing against yourself! To combat this problem always keep an eye out for ads that are not yours but look very similar.
If you find a suspicious ad use the HTTP header plug-in for Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3829) and look for a unique 6 character publisher ID. Report these ID’s (the entire url below) to your affiliate manager and have them penalize or suspend affiliates who poach on your PPC account.
Competitors on PPC can also drive up the CPC of your branded terms by bidding on your branded terms. The most damaging of these competitors are the ones who have a business similar to yours. They are trying to use your branded keyword traffic to steal sales! Not only will they bid on your branded keywords, but they could also try to create ands to confuse people who intend to be your customer. To combat this work with your search engine to see that your trademark is protected. The rules vary by search engine but if you file a trademark form and follow through with complaints you should be able to clean up your branded PPC space. By doing this you can ensure yourself the cheapest CPC possible which in turn should lower the CPA of your entire account.
By carefully watching your ads and working with your PPC search engines you can easily police your Brand and ensure all your hard work is not lining someone else’s pockets. Depending on how bad your situation is you could save as much as 80% on your cost per conversion for branded terms. Cost savings you can apply to other high cost non branded campaigns.
Once you’ve managed to take back your brand on Paid Search you can start saving your good name on Social Media networks. Check back on our blog next month for Take Back Your Brand Part II: Social Media.