Brand Versus Non-Brand

Breaking out brand vs non-brand paid search economics has been one of the core best practices employed by RKG for all clients since our inception. To drive a search program to its target metric, it is critical to evaluate its success excluding the effect of the sales and cost associated with sales on our client’s trademarks, domain names and permutations thereof.

We believe that when users search for our clients by name they will most likely get to our client’s site with or without our ads. These are ‘lay-down’ orders, not driven by search advertising but by other marketing initiatives, customer referral and the power of our client’s brand. PPC Ads should not be credited with these orders, nor can PPC control the volume of traffic on these terms.

We believe focusing on competitive non-brand search phrases is critical to driving incremental sales cost effectively.

For manufacturers, the brand/non-brand distinction is different. In these cases the brand phrases are in fact competitive, as you compete against your distribution network for sales. Nevertheless, watching the behavior of this class of terms remains important as they will convert differently than general product category related search terms.