I recently did a paid search marketing audit for a multi rooftop auto dealership. I discovered that close to 40% of their monthly ad spend was being consumed by branded terms. I’m talking about straight up search terms like “business name” or “business name city” or in the case of our auto dealership, “dealer name make” where clearly the intent was to find this particular dealer’s website, which ranks prominently at #1 organically for the mentioned keyword and a slew of others that were eating up ad spend. Clearly there was room for improvement.
How to Maximize Your Free Branded Traffic
- Identify all branded terms driving traffic in Adwords.
- Record the average positions and number of clicks each branded term received over a set period of time. Say 15 days.
- Check the organic rankings of the same set of keywords in Google. Record the average rankings and clicks over the same date range as your PPC set from analytics. Be sure to test on mobile as well as desktop.
- Pick which search term / terms you want to start your test with. You can start with just one keyword if you’re concerned about traffic drop or start with multiple keywords if you want faster results.
- To simplify things, start your test with only organic keywords that rank #1 in the Google search results. Pause the test keyword(s) in AdWords. To help increase accuracy, pause the keywords during a low traffic time, like 1:00 am.
- Keep the keyword(s) paused for the same amount of time as your sample data was drawn from. So if you collected your base data over a 15 day period, keep the keywords paused for 15 days.
- At the end of the test period record the organic average ranking and clicks for the test keyword(s). Assuming the average organic ranking of the test keywords didn’t fluctuate significantly, compare the clicks. Did you see an increase in organic traffic? If so, record the increase over the test data.
- Do you have additional keywords you want to test, return to step 4.
- Are you running ads on Bing? Repeat the process on Microsoft properties.
Finding the Branded Term Sweet Spot
If testing shows that your organic traffic for a branded keyword(s) increased during the test, then it’s time to find the sweet spot between your paid effort and free traffic.
For example, if you saw a 50% increase in click thru rate organically for a tested branded term, this is good as you are saving money. But if before the test you were getting 100 clicks organically, and 100 clicks through AdWords, then 50 clicks potentially fell through the cracks. It’s time to enable the paid version of the keyword and lower your bid amount. Start with a 10%-15% reduction. Stay at this bid level for a test period equal to your initial test (in our example, 15 days) and measure the results. Reduce the bid amount again and repeat the test.
Depending on the keyword, competitors, device and overall landscape of the search results, the ideal position for your paid ad should be just above your organic listing so that the searcher sees both simultaneously.
Keep testing various bid amounts until you find the sweet spot.The goal is to maximize the organic clicks while reducing the ad spend on the matching paid branded keyword by as much as possible.
Work on Those Low Organic Rankings
If during the branded keyword testing phase you came across branded keywords that weren’t ranking well organically, it’s time to get to work improving your organic rankings for those keywords. The better these keywords rank, the easier it will be to increase organic traffic and save more of your ad spend budget.