Search Branding: Loving the Clicks That Don't Convert: "Search Branding: Loving the Clicks That Don't Convert

The opportunity to do branding via search creates a great opportunity to think a bit deeper about the way search is planned, bought, and measured.

Advertisers Are Interested in Search, but Not Enough

In our continued survey work with search engine marketers, we find a large number of advertisers see branding as a benefit of search. Many set branding as a campaign goal. The trouble is measurement. Hardly any marketers even measure search campaign brand effect. Branding is viewed as a happy side effect of search. It's cool if someone discovers your company or product as a result of searching for something they're passionate about or interested in.

A significant reason for this lack of follow-through is the difficulty of measuring for branding, particularly with search. Because you pay for clicks and set your own price, you need a very clear sense of what a click's value is. If the click is supposed to lead to a purchase, you have a great beacon to navigate a bid strategy toward: the item's price. Without that beacon, you can easily feel lost."

Suggests: Develop the Beacon & Measure Horizontally

Concludes: "This path clearly represents a level of sophistication, and some marketers are already heading down it. Although you can't do anything now about the ad you serve, you can do plenty on your landing page. If you set a cookie detailing someone's past visits or purchases, you can grab that data when the person revisits via search (or any other way, for that matter). You can then craft a message that either hits on that person's interest points or follows through on previous messaging.

Either way, it moves search away from being a series of discrete transactions toward becoming the basis for constructing a relationship. That's really the difference between direct and branding when you come right down to it."

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