Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
professionalism of the page, the user's trust in the site, along with other factors such
as load time, all affect the user's positive or negative view of the Web site and brand.
Therefore, once the user is at the Web site, the onus is on the content providers to
convert the visit into actionable results. Now certainly, there must be a cognitive link
between the advertisement and the content on the landing page.
Branded keyphrases
There is always the question of whether or not to bid on branded keyphrases [
52
].
Branded keyphrases are those that refer to your company name, including official,
informal, and variations of spelling or misspellings. In general, branded keyphrases
(e.g., Google, Apple) do not refer to specific product names (i.e., Buzz, iPod), unless
the product name contains the name of the company or business (e.g., Google Maps,
Apple iPad).
Branded keyphrases typically are of one of the following four general types [
53
]:
•
Brand-pure
keyphrases
: include the brand word or words themselves, misspellings,
and deviations. Brand-pure keyphrases are the most narrow and focused set of branded
keyphrases. These are generally isolated into a separate ad group or campaign.
•
Navigational
brand
keyphrases
: include “brand Web site,” “brand homep-
age,” “brand company,” “brand city-name,” and even the “
www.brand.com
” (as
empirical tests have shown that people search on URLs [
54
]), plus many others.
Navigational brand keyphrases are the set of keyphrases where the searcher is try-
ing to find your company's Web site.
•
Brand-related
keyphrases
: include things like executive names along with other
terms and phrases that may be connected with the brand. A lot of these will be
developed as you perform analysis on the results you get from your initial broad
match (i.e., a matching option that incorporates variations of the keyphrase) to
brand-pure keywords.
•
Brand-plus
keyphrases
: your brand plus category, product, or other keywords.
These are often mixed in with other nonbrand keywords.
The arguments for not bidding on branded keyphrases are generally along the lines of
the branded keyphrases already ranking well organically. Why should I now pay for
something that I will be getting for free?
This question, of course, can and should be empirically tested for a particular
advertiser, as each context is somewhat different. When this has been empirically
tested, the results are generally that overall click-through rate (with both organic and
sponsored combined) is higher than either individually. However, there is limited
reported evidence on whether or not the overall conversion rate has also increased.
It would seem that the conversion rate would be unaffected, although the overall
percentage of conversions would increase in correlation to the increased number of
clicks.
So, from an empirical perspective, it generally makes sense to bid on branded
keyphrases, although the pricing and evaluation of these keyphrases need to be sep-
arate from nonbranded ones.
From a conceptual perspective, it also makes sense to bid on branded keyphrases.
The theoretical basis that supports this heuristic is the concept of customer choice sets.
