Lowering Brand Bids Can Help Increase Conversions

When businesses start an Adwords account, one of the most common questions we often hear is: “Do we really have to have a brand campaign?

The answer is yes, businesses most definitely should run a brand campaign. Here’s why.

Right now, as we speak, competitors are most likely bidding on your organization’s brand terms. Therefore, they are showing up ahead of your organic results in the SERP. Unfortunately, while we’d like to think that users would still click on the organic result of the brand they’re looking for, that’s not the case.

Most of the time, users will click on whatever link shows up first. If not the first one, then the second, third or fourth. If there is heavy competition for your brand terms, there could be 4 paid ads before your organic listing! And since users are inherently lazy, they are not going to scroll to the 5th listing if they can get the same solution from the first 4 listings.

For your paid marketing efforts you most likely have your own CPA goal for brand and non-brand. You understand that non-brand terms tend to be more expensive since there is higher competition. For brand, since you already dont feel like you should be spending a ton of money supporting it, you want your CPA to be as low as possible.

As an advertiser, one of your goals is to be in top positions, which unfortunately due to Google’s algorithm means that you are paying a higher price. If you’re in the top position then it is more likely to lead to a higher number of conversions.

But what if I told you that decreasing your brand bids can actually lead to more conversion volume?

That means more money in your wallet from ad spend saved and more conversions or customers in your que.  Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, I’ve got news for you.

Below are two examples of how clients bid down just slightly on their brand terms and were able to see significant improvements overall:

In January 2017 conversions for eMoney advisors were down compared to the previous year, despite our budget increasing 48%. We had increased our keyword bids in an attempt to drive more conversions. Unfortunately, this drove up CPA and caused weekly conversions from our High-Value Brand campaign to decrease. After digging into the data, we noticed that our keywords were generating less clicks with higher bids, causing us to spend our budget more quickly. After several brainstorms we decided to take a new approach. We were going to decrease our branded keyword bids to see if we could generate more clicks.

We decreased our bids about 15 – 20% lower than our normal bid levels and we immediately saw an increase in conversions. Generating more clicks gave us a larger opportunity to convert, and the data speaks for itself. This helped us beat our February conversions YoY, and break our all-time conversion record in March 2017! Lowering our bids had a minimal effect on our average position. For most of our keywords we stayed within the 1.0 to 1.5 position but our conversion volume increased significantly.

Another client here at Seer saw similar results. By bidding down on their brand terms they were able to cut down their avg CPC’s by 65% allowing their budget to be spread out longer throughout the day. The average position fell slightly, but overall average was still above 2.0.

Moral of the story is, you still have to pay for your brand terms but it is possible to get it down to a cheaper, more reasonable price.