Branded Search Vs SEO

Deep Dive

One of the old discussions that always finds its way to our day-to-day discussions is whether we are wasting performance marketing budget on SEM Brand?

First, let's clear some definitions to bring everyone to speed:

1. Branded search or SEM brand: describe the activity of running ads and bidding on your brand keyword. For example, your brand is e-commerce called XYZ, so you will run search ads on google. When prospect types XYZ, they will see your ads.

2. SEO: search engine optimization, a term that describes the activities that aim to rank a brand higher in the search engine result page organically through seeking content relevancy and technical optimizations to align with the search engine algorithm.

3. Attribution model: the science in which we decide how we reward a channel with a conversion

4. Incrementality: refer to the growth attributed to a specific marketing channel beyond exciting brand equity. Think about it as revenue that we couldn't have captured without a particular marketing channel interaction or effort

Let's get back to our problem statement: are we wasting our performance marketing budget by running branded search while we have free SEO?

Short answer No, the money spent on branded search is not wasted because:

1. You need to secure your brand name, nowadays, it's scarce to find a brand that is running, and no one is bidding on their brand name.

2. High ROAS (Return on ad spent), branded search is one of the most efficient performance marketing channels if it's done right.

3. Branded search will give you an extra ad Realestate which you can personalize based on your user type and the keyword they have used.

Businesses must decide on their performance marketing overall strategy.

A- Growth-focused: an example, we achieved 1x last year; we need to achieve 2x this year

B- Efficiency-focused: an example, we spent x last year; what can we get the same or slightly more with the same budget

If Your Brand Is Growth-Focused, It Doesn't Make Sense To Stop The Branded Search.

But what will be the case if your brand is efficiency-focused? and you don't care if competitors appear above you.

First: you need to review and understand your data source of truth. Please understand that the data you see in google analytics or any data platform is based on an attribution model. The data can easily miss capturing the customer journey. There is a dedicated post on my Linkedin profile about the attribution model.

Second: you need to run a study, stop branded search for a dedicated period, let's say 14 days (Don't Do This in Q4), record how much revenue you have lost daily from branded search, and record the increment on the SEO side on a daily basis and then you have your answer.

Personally, I did this study multiple times during my journey.

9 Out of 10 cases, SEO will fail to recover the branded search revenue gap.

But still, each business is unique.

By the time I wrote this article (Sunday, 23rd), I had done research on the brands which run branded searches here in the UAE; here is what I found:

1. Amazon

2. Namshi

3. Ikea

4. Carrefour

5. Talabat

As you can see, all the brands above have high brand equity; nevertheless, they run branded searches.

Share with me your thoughts below.

Thank you for reading.

Regards,

Gamal