To buy brand terms or not to buy brand terms, that is usually the question all brand marketers ask, but especially political ones. There are certain fundamental tactics that are the foundation of great search campaigns, and buying your own brand terms, rather than just relying on organic listings is one of them. Before we dive into why paid search is essential, let’s quickly look at data to understand how we came to our conclusions.
I looked at Google search data between October 1 and November 3, 2020 for a competitive Senate campaign. During that time, I saw more than 5.2 million organic searches and our ads appeared more than 3.2 million times in paid searches for our Senate client. Then I looked at search terms that had clicks from both organic listings and paid ads. For example, “Senate Client Name” had organic listing clicks and paid ad clicks during this period. We found 39 of these search queries and those searches delivered 50% of all paid search impressions. That should jump at you because there were another 1.6 million paid search impressions that didn’t generate ANY organic search clicks, and those impressions delivered 1/3 of all donations from paid search.
So which does better when a paid ad and an organic listing appears at the same time? I found that:
- Paid ads generated 160% better click thru rates and 155% better conversion rates than organic listings.
- Paid ads brought in 72% of all conversions and had 168% better average donation per click than organic clicks.
- So paid has better conversion rates, better click thru rates and higher average donation per click. Winner, right? Well, maybe but organic listings have their own story to tell. We found that:
- Organic listings deliver twice as many clicks via twice as many impressions.
- The average donation from organic search was over 300% higher than paid’s average donors.
So what do we make of this data? Clearly if someone already knows your client an organic listing will probably deliver higher average donors and a lot more clicks to your website. If I had to guess the reason for higher average donors, it’s due to more large donors. If you are looking for a lot of small dollar donors, paid ads seems to be the way to go. Paid ads have higher click thru rates, higher conversion rates, and the average donation per click is better.
So you might ask yourself, what built-in advantages do paid ads have over organic listings? Well plenty.
- Creative Variety: Besides rotating in different messaging (which you should be doing) and different ad formats (responsive, static, and dynamic keyword insertion), you can quickly change the messaging to take better advantage of fast moving stories.
- Landing Page Testing and Optimization: You can send clicks into different pages and update the messaging to reflect the ads
- Top of Page Results: Paid ad positions can dominate the top of the page and when it it’s a mobile page, there are even less positions available to you.
- Your Ads Stand Out and Are Flagged as Ads: In the example above, the campaign website isn’t even above the fold. People have to scroll to get to it. Very often, Google has tons of information ahead of your organic listing An official listing, Wikipedia, Knowledge Boxes, Top Stories, Questions, and Images. That’s a long way to go to find your organic listing for your campaign website.
Yes, buying brand terms costs money but they deliver higher click thru rates, conversions, and ultimately higher donations per click. Only about 1/3 of your impressions will result in a paid ad click, but when they do click it’s super important.
Buying brand terms works and it’s the only way to make sure your campaign site gets top priority. In a hotly contested race, I would never ignore paid ads on brand terms and without paying for those ads, you have no guarantee that the searcher will donate to your campaign and besides about 2/3 of the searchers will click on the organic brand listing anyway.
PardonMyFrench,
Eric
