October 12, 2009

Be sure to have a "branded" campaign filled with variations of your company name and website.

Not only do you want to ensure ad dominance for your own keywords, but it will help separate these highly performing keywords from everything else, so as not to skew your overall account statistics.

Creating a branded campaign is key to online advertising success as you will want your company to come up when users are specifically searching for your company.

You would want to bid on all versions of your company's name including:

the correct spelling
common misspellings
your company name followed by.com
your company web address
your company name with the www. before it

For example, say your company was called Cheesemonger. You would want to bid on the following keywords:

cheesemonger
cheesemongers
chesemonger
cheesemunger
thecheesemonger
www cheesemonger
cheesemonger com
www.cheesemonger.com
www cheesemonger com

Directly bidding on these keywords, means searches are specifically looking for you, so it is important that you don't miss out on this profitable opportunity. Plus, if your company's site is already ranked organically you will show up twice, once in the paid listings and once in the organic listings, which can only help!

Initially you may think, why should I pay for my own keywords if my site is already in the organic listings, but if you show up twice, people will most definitely find your company. Plus, you don't want competitors snapping up your traffic because they are bidding on your branded terms and you are not.

Not to mention, if you are having trouble getting your site to rank on the first page of the organic search results, bidding on your branded keywords is a surefire way to show up.

Typically your branded campaign will get you the cheapest conversions out of any of your campaigns because clearly you must be the most relevant choice if you actually are that company, so you will be paying the least amount for your own terms.

Lastly, you will want to have these terms isolated in a separate campaign so that you can strategically bid for these less expensive terms. If you have your branded terms mixed in with other general terms, you may end up bidding these terms higher than is necessary.

In essence, if people are searching for your specific company name, they want your exact product or service, so missing out on this easy way to make money would just be foolish. Go out and make yourself a branded campaign today!

We've recorded a few more AdWords strategies and posted a six-minute video to help you get better results with your online advertising.

Posted by Katherine Anderson, PPC Specialist at 12:27 PM

Social Bookmarks: