Paid Search: why shift from branded to generic keywords

In the Paid Search indus­try, the ques­tion whether a com­pa­ny should focus their efforts on their own brand name has been a sub­ject of fierce debate for many years. The very fact that it comes up so reg­u­lar­ly and splits so many opin­ions shows very well that the answer is quite com­plex, and will depend on many fac­tors: mar­ket­ing goals, bud­get, com­pet­i­tive land­scape… In this arti­cle, we’ll explore in more details how shift­ing from brand­ed to gener­ic key­words could be ben­e­fi­cial for your business.

Brand­ed terms are searched by clients already aware of the brand, so have gen­er­al­ly quite a high ROI asso­ci­at­ed with them, and are cost effec­tive. There are nec­es­sary in order to pro­tect your brand and tai­lor your brand mes­sag­ing. They also give you more con­trol over the visitor’s jour­ney, are a good oppor­tu­ni­ty for test­ing, and allow to obtain big­ger SERP vis­i­bil­i­ty, which means more traf­fic and direct sales.

How­ev­er, gener­ics key­words have much more poten­tial than brand­ed terms, as they have the pow­er to cre­ate aware­ness and to recruit new clients. Indeed, most of the paths to con­ver­sion begin with cus­tomers shop­ping around on the gener­ic key­words (enter­prise soft­ware, French wines etc…) along with com­peti­tor sites and com­par­i­son engines. Then, that’s only when cus­tomers have decid­ed what to pur­chase, and where from, that they will search for a brand­ed term. That’s why gener­ics terms are absolute­ly essen­tial in order to devel­op your sales.

With a shift towards gener­ics, it is also very impor­tant to edu­cate stake­hold­ers regard­ing KPI. For most of cas­es, the brand relat­ed key­words per­form bet­ter than the gener­ic key­words. This is because any­body who search­es for a brand is aware about the prod­uct and is ready to take action. Indeed, on a last click basis your gener­ics gen­er­al­ly will look ter­ri­ble in terms of ROI or cost per acqui­si­tion (CPA). Your stake­hold­ers need to be aware of this behind the scene reality.

We can­not how­ev­er make a mis­take by under-esti­mat­ing the gener­ic key­words that are assist­ing the brand con­ver­sions. That’s why this strat­e­gy also neces­si­tates the imple­men­ta­tion of a dif­fer­ent attri­bu­tion mod­el, giv­ing the gener­ics cred­it for con­ver­sions where they did the hard work. In some cas­es, this might be impos­si­ble with­out the instal­la­tion of a more advanced track­ing sys­tem. It is also impor­tant to look at dif­fer­ent type of met­rics, to real­ly under­stand the weight of gener­ics terms in the over­all strat­e­gy, like click rate, num­ber of views or num­ber of down­loads when there is a free trial.

What about you, what do you think about the shift from brand­ed to gener­ic key­words? Do not hes­i­tate to share your views and expe­ri­ences about its new ver­sion in the com­ments section!