iQuanti’s Post

Transcript

We still end up over indexing a lot of our spends on branded search because of the kind of numbers that it delivers, better ROI, lower Cpas. Everybody tries to maximize their impact coming in from branded paid search. But lo and behold, one single question that we hear from almost all of our clients is why am I paying for my qualified traffic? Because someone is already searching for my brand name, so he is more likely to come and convert for me. So why should I spend? On branded paid search and is it even justified? Because if you look at your overall paid search trends, there is quite a bit of spends that go towards branded paid search over the years. What we have realized is of course, I mean, that's a very fair question, but does not have a straightforward answer because even when you look at branded paid search or branded search terms, not all search terms or keywords have the same or similar sort of intent. So you know, they're, they're all very different. Even though they're all branded paid search terms, the searches could vary by intent, right? So there could be like let's say probably awareness intent, there could be some. Inflation impact, there could be comparison intent and then we could also have bottom funnel conversion intent. Not all have same competition. So for some of the keyword themes, which are probably more bottom funnel focused or let's say typically to give an example from BFS, you would see balance transfer to have like let's say much higher competition as compared to some of the other sub segments within credit cards. Your competition also varies by theme. So you know, you cannot generalize that across all of the branded search keywords. Of course, there are other factors as well. I mean, you could look at also layering a lot of audiences. Into this and then figure out OK, this is a qualified audience so probably you know I I stand a better chance of you know delivering results from the qualified audience versus the non qualified audience. There could be difference of intent based on geos so you as a brand could have retail presence or physical presence in some of the geographies. So that's why you see stronger brand equity coming in from those areas. These keywords would also be different from you know the keywords which are like let's say probably not coming in from the geos where you may not have a strong presence. So when we are looking at this extremely complicated web. So what we are saying is probably one of the most effective ways for us to figure out whether branded search works or not is incrementality testing. What we have seen from our multiple experiments is typically the kind of incrementality that branded search delivers on these is less than 10%. So what it means is if tomorrow I end up causing some of the branded paid search campaigns for these themes, of course you know in terms of the volume dip that I will see is not going to be more than 10% because a major chunk of that is also going to be covered up by SEO. And of course this may vary from client to client. From category to category. So obviously we'll have to dive deeper into each of the clients on a case by case basis, but this is what we see. There could be some of the other themes where people are somewhere in the advanced consideration to eventually getting into the beginning of the purchase journey. So over there you would see that there are still evaluating. So they might be looking at terms which have brand plus feature terms that is a signal of you know probably comparison intent they might be looking at probably this is one of the options. But then they have got other brands also in the consideration set when we went ahead and paused branded search for you know some of the. Limited set of keywords within these themes, we see quite a significant incremental impact coming in from branded paid search. Basically, if you end up pausing our branded SCM on these themes, you will see a big, big dip in your volumes, which will not be able to be bumped up by Sue. You continue investing in branded paid search, but at the same time keep investing in improving your SEO to a certain extent where you try and move the second pillar into the first pillar wherein you know your SU and CRA initiatives are strong enough for you to kind of like give, you know those kind of results. Just, you know, without branded paid search and then, you know, you can start moving some of those segments from pillar to pillar one.