Bidding on brand keywords is an important investment. It prevents competitors from poaching customers who are looking for you by name. I’m going back in time in December 2018. We hired a new Brand Marketing Manager to create a marketing strategy for the second largest division in the company. Within two weeks into the role, she was ready to make a name for herself. She declared our CPL’s are too high. Therefore, she proceeded that I (as the Digital Marketing Manager) cut branded keyword bidding in Google Ads. Immediately this raised some red flags from my end for the following reasons:
- Reports showed branded terms were converting 149:1 RoAS.
- Branded keywords had the highest converters for all digital media.
- The website did not have stellar SEO that made us dependent heavily on Pay-Per-Click
Without being sure how she concluded to cut branded keywords with only two weeks into the job, both the SEM agency and I pleaded in our case not to pause branded keywords. This turned out to be a nightmare. Our Marketing Analyst showed the overall impact of branded keywords was performing for the company. In most cases, a non-biased contributor such as an analyst would be able to close the conversation for us. Unfortunately, this did not! She raised distrust of the data, again within two weeks on the job! The leadership team decided to keep bidding on branded keywords as we continue to dissect the data with a fine-tooth comb.
Fast forward one year, I created a best-in-class attribution model by UTM parameters, which showed bidding on branded keyword strategy is an absolute must. The Brand Manager did not trust the UTM log, Google Analytics, or me. This was the start of one of many toxics run ends with this Brand Manager.
Have you had a comparable situation? How did you handle it? Leave your comments below.
