Editorial Articles

With the importance of navigational searches incorporating a brand name as a shortcut to a company or its services, it’s crucial that businesses pay close attention to how they’re managed. This means making sure your agency or internal paid search specialists report separately on search performance for brand search terms. It also means that you need to review the implications of any changes in policy to use of brand terms within paid search advertising and in particular Google Adwords, which as you’ll know accounts for more than 90% of UK searches.

In navigational search or brand searching behaviour, searchers aim to go directly to a known company site by typing in the site or brand name. Alternatively, they will type the site or brand name and append a qualifier such as a product name to the query. This shortcuts the site navigation and may make up for shortcomings in the sites own search engine or navigation.
Research by Atlas and Hitwise shows that navigational searches may account for over half of all searches and the figure is higher for well-known brands or companies who are not effective in tapping into the non-navigational searches. Certainly, it’s one of the KPIs we review when auditing search marketing for a company, paying particular attention to the proportion of brand search clicks for paid and natural search. I’ve seen cases where branded search can account for 80 to 90% of all clicks when insufficient attention has been paid to generic and long-tail search terms.

Of course attracting converting visitors at a lower cost is more straightforward for brand search terms, so it’s essential to separate out reporting into brand and non-brand to review performance for the more challenging non-brand terms. I’m surprised how few companies do this in top-level reports, yet it’s straightforward to setup within an analytics package, for example, using Google Analytics custom advanced segments.

Recently, focus on brand search terms has been highlighted by the September 2010 Google Adwords ad text trademark policy change for the UK and Europe. It’s important to review the implications of this to your paid search account performance, and to be aware of how different competitors within your market react. We believe it increases the need for use of quality brand reputation management services. If you have a range of resellers of your product or service it’s particularly important to review your strategy as the number and type of paid search competitors may increase. We saw that previous changes permitting bidding on brand terms had a very different impact depending on the market. Although there were fears of increased bid competition and PPC costs, a relatively small bid spike occurred and most believe a similar situation will occur this time around.

Although the 2010 announcement has caused a fair stir, our view is that it’s really just an evolution in policy, you could say a “storm in a teacup”. There was arguably a more significant change in 2008 when Google permitted bidding on brand terms in these markets for the first time, i.e. specifying competitor brand terms as keywords to trigger ads. The trademark bid change in 2008 saw up to 20% increase in click costs, and although this change may give a similar effect through competition, this approach has been in the US for sometime and has not generally caused bidding wars.

The main change in 2010 permits the use of competitor brand terms within the creative itself – this was previously prevented for trademarked terms Google was aware of. Talking to our paid search account management team on the practical implications, they point out a benefit in the way Google evaluates ads through quality score; the inclusion of brand terms in creative will help improve quality scores and increase ad clickthrough rates, which will bring costs down for some advertisers who couldn’t previously use brand terms within the creative.

Whatever the consequences of the recent Google Trademark policy change, it’s a timely reminder to brands of the importance of paying close attention to managing the returns from crucial navigational searches. 

Dr Dave Chaffey
Insights Director, ClickThrough Marketing
Twitter: clickthroughsem
Facebook: clickthroughmarketing