Google Assigns Branding Value To Search

July 21st, 2008

MediaPost has a short piece on Google’s recent study that shows the branding effect of paid search and SEO. Of course Google benefits from this data since it leads advertisers to believe they can afford to pay more for PPC search in order to capitalize on the “branding” value. The article seems to think that most advertisers do not take the “free branding” aspect into consideration when buying PPC search terms.

I don’t know about other advertisers but I can certainly say that NETexponent clients are ahead of the game in this area. Most of the clients using our search marketing services have already placed a branding value on key search terms. To this extent we even manage these terms differently than the rest of their efficiency driven search campaigns. Terms that are important to building our clients’ brand are typically placed in a bucket we call “brand critical” and optimized to different metrics and goals. The performance of brand critical keywords is evaluated on a revenue basis as well as their impact on brand building efforts.

The tolerance for CPCs related to branding vs. acquisition will always differ depending on the advertiser’s specific goals so our team uses a custom approach in every case. However, I thought it was important to note that NETexponent clients seem to be ahead of the curve according to how Google sees the PPC search marketplace.

This is yet another reason we love working with smart clients.