Brand SERPs Foundations Course: Optimizing Google Ads
Script from the lesson The Brand SERPs Foundations Course
Jason Barnard speaking: Google ads manual campaigns. What’s the situation? Google ads is a really easy place to start to improve your brand SERPS. Google ads are front and center and right at the top, and you have full control.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, what are your main aims when using Google ads to improve your brand SERPs?
Jason Barnard speaking: Firstly, you want to dominate. With a well-optimized ad for your brand on your brand SERP, you get a really nice big chunk of real estate right at the top, and that real estate is dedicated to your brand and your brand message.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now I’m sure you really want to control your brand message as much as you possibly can. Here’s an opportunity to do so. You choose what you put in your ads, and Google will display it because you’re paying. So you can control your brand message front and center right at the top.
Jason Barnard speaking: Secondly, you want to retain existing clients. Existing clients search your brand name simply to navigate to your site. In my experience, most brands underestimate this aspect of brand searches and brand SERPs. It’s highly probable that existing clients search for your brand name in Google more than you think they do. Why do they search your brand name? Because they don’t remember the domain name. They don’t have a bookmark or maybe just because they’re lazy, and remember people are getting lazier and lazier, so the volume of brand searches is going to increase in the coming years.
Jason Barnard speaking: So, your clients are navigating to your site by searching in Google for your brand name. They’re looking to get to specific areas of your site. Make sure that your ads give your existing customers the option of clicking straight through to the different areas of your site that they are likely to be interested in. The login page or the after-sale service section or the blog, they’re very good examples. To do this, you’ll need to use sitelink extensions, and we’ll look at those a little bit later on in this tutorial.
Jason Barnard speaking: Thirdly, you want to convert valuable leads. Some people are searching your brand name because they already visited once and are interested in your product or services, or maybe because they heard about you through another channel. Either way, they Googled your brand with the intention of learning more about you and to do business with you. You want to make sure that the ad you pushed to the top convinces them that you are the brand they want to do business with. This ad could very well push them over the line to convert.
Jason Barnard speaking: So that’s three great reasons to have your ads on your brand SERP. Not all brands need this. If you’ve optimized your homepage and triggered the rich sitelinks, and perhaps you own the next couple of results below that, you’re already dominating above the fold with content you control. Google ads won’t bring much extra value in that case. In any other case, they could prove to be profitable for you.
Jason Barnard speaking: All of that is just you in isolation with your ad on your brand SERP. You control above the fold with highly-optimized content that you control. Wonderful. But your competitors may be bidding on your brand name too. What happens here?
Jason Barnard speaking: In this example, there’s quite a lot of action from multiple competitors. They’re trying to steal leads, but they’re also trying to steal existing customers. The danger is real in both cases, but there’s a big problem for your competitors. Their campaigns on your brand name are unlikely to be directly profitable, and by optimizing your branded Google ad campaigns, you can make things worse for them and save some money at the same time.
Jason Barnard speaking: Optimizing your campaigns will reduce your costs, improve your profitability and also push costs up for your competitors making their campaigns even less profitable than they were before, and that could ultimately mean that they just get off your brand SERP.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, what are the mechanics that allow you to push their costs up by pushing your costs down?
Jason Barnard speaking: The key is quality score. Google rewards ads that satisfy its users by giving them lower prices. The mechanism it uses to evaluate that satisfaction is quality score. Higher quality score means a lower cost per click. Quality score is calculated based on three signals: ad relevance, expected click-through rate and landing page experience. On your exact brand term, you should naturally score highly on all three. And so your quality score is likely to be 10 out of 10 without very much effort.
Jason Barnard speaking: Your competitors, on the other hand, will have a significantly lower click-through rate, their ad will be less relevant, and they will have a lower score for the landing page experience since the user is looking for you and not them. Since your competitors perform less well on all three metrics, they will have a lower quality score and therefore a higher cost per click. And that all means your competitors are paying way more than you for a click on your branded terms, which is why it is difficult for them to be making Google ad campaigns on your brand name profitable.
Jason Barnard speaking: The difference can be as much as 10 times more. Obviously, how much they pay per click depends on how well they optimize their campaigns, but more than any other type of campaign, their cost per click depends on how well you optimize your campaigns.
Jason Barnard speaking: Everything is relative here. As your quality score goes up, theirs will go down. As your costs fall, theirs will rise. Ideally, you will force their costs to rise to the point where their campaigns lose so much money that they drop their campaigns on your brand SERPs altogether, and that chases them off your brand SERP and it you reclaim your Google home page.
Jason Barnard speaking: Importantly, you can’t stop them from bidding on your brand name on Google. The only way to get them off your brand SERP is to make their campaigns too costly for them. I’ll show you how below.
Jason Barnard speaking: So whether it’s to dominate your brand SERP to retain existing clients or to face up to competitors, exact-match branded Google ad campaigns are well worth spending time on and doing properly. How do you do them properly? As I said earlier on, you should have above average for the expected click-through rate, the ad relevance, and the landing page experience. You should have a quality score of 10 out of 10.
Jason Barnard speaking: You might think that you’ve nailed it already, but here’s where you might sit back and relax and stop optimizing thinking you’ve really got it made. Many people do. They think they’ve no more room for improvement. But you haven’t nailed it. There is room for improvement, and that means you can cut your costs even further.
Jason Barnard speaking: It’s important to remember that the score Google shows you is not very granular. My experience has been that even when you have 10 out of 10 for each of the three metrics, you can push your quality score up further and often quite a lot. You won’t see this quality score increase, but you will see cost-per-click fall as you optimize. You’ll be very pleasantly surprised, I’m sure. I’ve seen some clients make savings of 30% or more when they implement the tactics I’m about to show you.
Jason Barnard speaking: So, what do you need to do? First off, protect your trademark. A lot of brands don’t do this, but if you don’t protect your trademark in Google ads, your competitors will be able to use your trademark in their ad copy. That helps improves their click-through rates and thus improves their quality score and cut their costs, and you don’t want that. You can stop them. You just need to fill in this form. But you need to hold the trademark in the territory you’re asking to be protected, so make sure you’ve got the trademark and have the relevant reference numbers to prove it. You also need examples of other brands using your brand name in their ad copy.
Jason Barnard speaking: Unfortunately, you can’t protect your brand name proactively in Google. Google asks you to prove that somebody is already using your brand term in their ads. So make sure you’ve got your trademark in the country or looking to protect, find an example and then fill in the form, submit it, and your competitors will no longer be able to use your brand name in their ad copy in that territory. That adds a significant additional handicap for them. Not being able to use your brand name, the keywords that the user typed, it’s even more difficult for them to create relevant ads that attract the eye and get the click. And that’s two aspects of their quality score that will take a significant hit and their costs will rise.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now onto saving money for yourself. This is obviously key, whether you have competitors on your brand SERP or not. If you’re the only company bidding on your brand term, you’ll save money. But if you have competitors on your brand SERP, every time you reduce your cost per click, their cost per click goes up. Either way, this will save you money. How much money depends on many factors, but my clients have seen savings of around 30% as I mentioned earlier. Big bonus.
Jason Barnard speaking: Once you have gone through and set all this up, very little maintenance will be necessary. It isn’t quite “set it up and forget it”, but it’s not very far off. As I mentioned, the score that Google shows you is a rough guide. Even with this quality score of 10 out of 10, you can almost always push up your quality score. So even though you won’t see your score increasing, there is room to improve and pull your costs down. There’s actually quite a lot of room usually.
Jason Barnard speaking: To save money, you need to focus on the three things that affect quality score: ad relevance, landing page experience, and expected click-through rate. What can you actually do? Firstly, ad relevance. For exact match on your own brand name, you will always be very relevant. So you would think that there’s nothing you can do here, but there is. Make sure you have an ad group that is exact match. No other terms should enter this ad group. Any terms that are not exact match will pull the quality score down. This way, the relevancy aspect of your quality score for your exact match brand line is as high as it possibly can be.
Jason Barnard speaking: If you want to target a broader set of branded keywords, put them in separate ad groups. If you have multiple languages, make sure that you have a campaign for each of those languages. That way you can accurately target the language using the settings in the campaign level, and that will minimize wasted spend on ads showing to people in the wrong language. And that happens more than you would think.
Jason Barnard speaking: Next, make sure you target the country correctly. Once again, in settings at campaign level. If you have only one country or one region, make sure you target it explicitly in the settings.
Jason Barnard speaking: If you advertise in multiple countries, you will benefit from isolating them and creating specific campaigns for each. Even with the same language, culture can change enormously between countries. In such cases, you would want to adapt the way you address the audience according to the cultural differences between the populations of those countries. For example, a campaign aimed at the North American market would have slightly different spellings and use slightly different vocabulary than one aimed at the UK market. It may also contain a more pushy sales tone or put offers more to the fore. Even if you currently have above average for the ad relevance, that doesn’t mean to say you’re fully optimized. It just means you are, well, above average—not necessarily excellent and probably not perfect.
Jason Barnard speaking: Secondly, click-through rate. This is often the biggest winner. Now, what affects the click-through rate? Every piece of copywriting from the title to the description, to every single extension. Importantly, your title needs to contain your brand name, and you might also want to add the registered trademark symbol because that’s a really nice trick for catching the eye. But more than anything, your title needs to be enticing. It needs to attract the eye and encourage the click. You need to provide at least two descriptions. Google can use any one of these descriptions you provide. Sometimes it will use two, so make sure they fit together. The role of the description in a brand ad is to communicate your brand message and entice the click. Make sure you write them with that in mind.
Jason Barnard speaking: As with any Google ads campaign, extensions are vital. They are often underestimated or forgotten entirely. They give you more real estate, allow you to provide a more complete message, and provide more opportunities to convince the user to click on your ad. And the more you provide, the more Google can test which ones and which combination works the best for your brand. Here’s some callouts. I love callouts a lot. Google uses them a lot, and they’re an amazing opportunity for you to provide extra information about your brand, information that you are putting front and center for people who just search for your brand name.
Jason Barnard speaking: Next, sitelinks. I love sitelinks even more than I love callouts. They allow the person who searched for your brand name to access a specific area of your website directly. That saves them time and they’ll thank you for it. It also increases the amount of real estate your ad occupies, and that means your ad dominates above the fold on your brand SERP. If you give descriptions for every single site link extension, they look like this and can more than double the amount of real estate your ad occupies and that’s above the fold and your ad becomes very, very difficult to miss. If you don’t put the descriptions for your site links, you won’t get this really nice chunk of real estate at the top of the SERP. And remember, this is real estate where you control the message top front and center.
Jason Barnard speaking: Callouts and sitelinks apply to any brand and they’re the most powerful in any brand SERP situation, but don’t waste any opportunity. Here’s the list of the extensions you can use. I won’t go into details since the following are not useful to everyone, so look up how they work on Google ads, help section. There’s a link in the support material below this lesson and use as many as are truly useful to you and useful to your target audience. Sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, call extensions, message extensions, location extensions, affiliate location extensions, price extensions, app extensions, promotion extensions, and lead form extensions. That’s quite a list.
Jason Barnard speaking: All of these help you get your message across better, give you more real estate front and center at the top of the SERP and improve your click-through rate, push up your quality score, and push your cost per click down, and importantly, push your competitors away from your brand SERP. Thirdly, landing page experience. Many brands use the homepage as the landing page for branded campaigns in Google ads. Perhaps you are, and that’s fine as long as your homepage has a very brand-focused message. If you’ve optimized your homepage for other terms then it’s probably not going to perform optimally for exact match brand searches. You might want to create a dedicated landing page that allows you to get a hyper-focused brand message across to people who click on your ad. Your landing page message needs to focus on who you are, what you do, and why the person would want to do business with you. What’s your unique selling point. If your landing page communicates that effectively, the landing page factor of your quality score will go up.
Jason Barnard speaking: When deciding whether to create a dedicated landing page or not, just ask yourself, does your homepage give an uncluttered, clear, and convincing reason for somebody to do business with you? If not, create a dedicated brand landing page for Google ads that does.
Jason Barnard speaking: You could go even as far as to have a different landing page for each country so the message fits properly culturally. Going further still, for each of the audiences we see later on—customers, hot prospects, prospects, and newcomers—you could create a dedicated landing page for each of those. Now you need to make sure that your landing page gives a great UX. If your landing page does not deliver a great UX, user experience, some people will return to the SERP, and your quality score will go down, and that means your costs will go up. You need to ensure that your landing page is super mobile-friendly. User experience is especially important on mobile. If your site is not very mobile-friendly, you’re giving yourself a handicap with the landing page aspect of your quality score. If you aren’t super mobile-friendly, quality score will go down, and costs will go up. You want your landing page to be super fast. If people have to wait too long, they get frustrated, they bounce off your website, quality score goes down, prices go up. So, great user experience and super-fast site speed are fundamentally important on mobile devices, and mobile devices are more and more prevalent in search. Check what percentage of people Googling your brand name are doing so mobile; that will probably motivate you to make the effort to perfect these aspects of your landing page experience.
Jason Barnard speaking: For all three factors—ad relevance, click-through rate, and landing page experience—even if you have above-average, that doesn’t mean to say you fully optimized. It just means you are above average—not necessarily excellent and probably not perfect.
Jason Barnard speaking: Next, audiences. This is very powerful. When you’re organizing your ads into groups and campaigns, ask yourself, who is searching. There are existing clients, hot prospects ready to buy, prospects just learning who you are and what you offer, and, finally, newcomers who know your brand only from secondhand sources. You should create audiences for each of these. Create the audiences in analytics and import them into Google ads. Then create ad groups for each audience and use the include audience feature in Google ads to segment them. Each user will receive ads from the ad group that is optimized for the audience they belong to. And by optimize, I mean that every ad, every extension, and every landing page will be absolutely perfect for this specific audience member. That means your ads are relevant with a high click-through rate and an amazing landing page experience, and your quality score goes up.
Jason Barnard speaking: So create audiences for existing clients, hot prospects, prospects, and then the audience for newcomers is everybody who isn’t in one of the first three audiences. First audience, existing clients. Existing clients need a specific message. This is all about retention. You need to keep them. You don’t need to convert them. The ad should reassure them that they are working with the right brand. Then site links provide them with improved usability and easy direct access to the parts of the site they’re looking for: the login page, the after-sales service, or perhaps the blog. Next audience, hot prospects. These are people who have visited your site multiple times or perhaps people who have signed up for a free trial. In either case, they’re keen. They just need a nudge over the finishing line. Perhaps a sales-y message would help. Perhaps a special not-to-be-missed, limited offer. Prospects. These are people who have visited your site once or twice. They’re still in the consideration phase. Encourage them to engage further with your brand. Don’t oversell or bully.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now that’s three very specific types of people. Anyone not in those three audiences is a newcomer. These are people who have never visited your site and have therefore not seen your message through an environment that you control. Think multichannel marketing. Perhaps they’ve seen you on social media or maybe on TV. Perhaps they read an article about you or saw your CMO on a webinar. They haven’t heard your brand message from you, and here’s your opportunity to provide a great teaser right on the SERP and coax them into your site so that you can give them the full brand message and convert them into a prospect or even a hot prospect, and then ultimately a client.
Jason Barnard speaking: To create the newcomers campaign, simply use the exclude audience feature in the ad group and exclude the existing clients, hot prospects, and prospects. The next step, choose your strategy. Most of the time, you’ll want to choose “Cost per acquisition,” as I’ll explain later. But oftentimes, people focus on the competition and choose “Outrank a specific competitor.” If somebody is being very aggressive on your brand term, this can be a good strategy. You can choose to outrank them to make sure they’re always below you. Another option is to focus on “Top of the page.” No matter who is bidding on your brand keyword, you want to be top. That means Google will place you top of the page, front and center, whatever the cost.
Jason Barnard speaking: In neither case, will you win 100% of the time. Google always leaves itself a little margin to maneuver. However, both of these strategies can prove to be costly. If your competitors are bidding very aggressively, perhaps running loss leader campaigns, using these strategies can push your costs up significantly, and your costs can easily get out of control. That’s why I always tend to use “Cost per acquisition”. That means I’m more sure that I will make money from the campaign. I don’t mind being second or third as long as people clicking on my ad make me money. Being first and losing money doesn’t make business sense in the long term. You have to balance between cost, profit, and protecting your brand SERP. In the vast majority of cases, CPA really should be the long term strategy. Exceptions would just be if you need to defend your space in your industry, or if there’s a short term war that you have to win at all costs, then “Top of the page” or “Outrank a competitor” would work very well.
Jason Barnard speaking: So here we go. The conclusion, if you’ve segmented your audiences you can set separate CPAs for each. You can have dedicated, targeted ad copy, use specific extensions, send users to ultra-relative landing pages. That’s a very powerful combination. It’s the nirvana of branded Google ads campaigns. Now, copywriting. This is incredibly important. You have limited space, so you need to be clear, concise, and yet convincing. And that’s a tough balance to strike. You won’t get it right the first time. Be prepared to write and rewrite your ad copy multiple times before you get that balance right. Once you have found the right balance, the copy for your branded ads will need very little tweaking. So take the time and be patient to get it right at the start. It really does pay.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, a few general pointers. There’s no need to introduce yourself. If the person has searched for your brand, they already know who you are to some extent. You don’t need to introduce, but you do need to ensure that your brand name appears in the title simply because seeing the brand name reassures people. They searched the brand name, they expect to see it in the blue link. Plus, as we saw earlier when we were looking at trademarks, this is one big advantage you have over your competitors. It would be a real pity to waste it. The texts for descriptions and extensions need to use a consistent voice that resonates with your target audience and that makes sense for you as a brand. It’s vital that your copywriting communicates a message that makes your audience trust you and encourages them to believe that you are already or are going to be a great partner for them. Be positive, be helpful, and be honest. Be clear, be concise, be convincing. Here’s a good example. I’ll let you read it.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now quickly back to the situation where your competitors are not bidding on your brand term. I advise you to create a campaign and optimize it because by doing so, it allows you to truly dominate your brand SERP, protect your brand image, and communicate your brand message in the way you want to top, front and center. That said, if your brand search looks great and your competitors are not going to intrude then you can reasonably choose not to advertise.
Jason Barnard speaking: Thank you.
