Video: How to run hyper-efficient branded search campaigns in 2025 | Duration: 4272s | Summary: How to run hyper-efficient branded search campaigns in 2025

Transcript for "How to run hyper-efficient branded search campaigns in 2025": Hey, everyone. Welcome to the webinar today. As usual, before we get into the content, we're just gonna give a couple of minutes for people to join the session here live with us today. And while we're waiting, I'll just quickly introduce our guest speaker for today. So I'm delighted to be joined by Chris Nightingale, founder of Candu Digital Marketing. How are things to you today, Chris? Yeah. Hi, James. Hi, everyone. I'm, yeah, going good. So, obviously, getting to that cold time of year. So I'm locked indoors with the heating on full blast, but now it's going going all good. And I just before we switched on the mic, so I was just admiring how nice your kind of recording setup looks there, especially the lights in the background. It's, really nicely presented there. Thanks. Yeah. It's, took me a while to get the colors right, but, yeah, that's the one thing I've realized over the last few months of running my own business is just, like, buying all the little things that you wouldn't otherwise treat yourself to, like lights and cameras and all the fun stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And, thank you to Peter for dropping the little, Lionel Richie hello in there to the chat. Appreciate that. We me and you, Chris, we actually recorded a podcast together last week. That will be released in January next year. But when we were recording that podcast, there was actually someone outside your house cutting down a tree and chucking branches into a wood chipper. So from the sides of it, it doesn't seem like there's any, wood cutting down going on today. Touch wood. I hope not. Yeah. Touch wood. I hope not. Yeah. It's it's been pretty clear today, so fingers crossed. But that that was it's a strange time. It's literally as soon as we were about to film that podcast. The second song racked up and then got the chainsaw out. It was inevitable. Yeah. Yeah. And how was your Black Friday experience at Candu? Good. Yeah. Busy. Yeah. Really busy. It's one of those where it's it's really busy in the lead up, and then once you hit it, it feels like you're sort of just riding the wave out a little bit because you've done all that hard work. You've done all the prep, in the weeks before. So, yeah, it's good. It's busy, but but productive. Nice. Nice. So we have had a few more people join, though. And I do apologize that we're not starting right away, because I can see the comment in the chat there. But, we do usually have to give at least a couple of minutes for for people to join the live session, but we have had people join, though. Again, welcome to everyone, either if you're here at the live session or watching back on demand. And special welcome to anyone who's, been at any of our previous webinars this year. We've run quite a few throughout 2024, and this will be our last one. So thank you if you did tune in to any of those previous ones. For those that don't know me, I'm James. I'm the content lead here at Lunu, and I'll be hosting the webinar today. So we're aiming for about 50 minutes to get through the content with some time left at the end for the q and a, which I will say more about in just a second. But there are just a few other very quick bits of housekeeping, before we get into today's agenda. We are recording the session, and it'll be available to watch back on demand. So if you have any questions for Chris, please do pop those into the q and a tab so they don't get lost in the main chat. And we'll try and get Ryan to as many of those as we can at the end of the session, and you can also upvote for your preferred questions, if you're particularly interested in those. We'll also have someone from our team here at Lunio behind the scenes responding to those questions via the chat as well. Also, we have some resources and helpful links that I'll be directing your attention to throughout the session today, and you can find those in the docs tab, next to the live chat. So there, you'll be able to get more context and free resources that relate to some of the content we'll be covering today. And in the docs section, you can also find a link to Chris's LinkedIn profile. So you can connect with him if you'd like to learn more about any of the topics we touched on today, and I'm sure he'll be happy to answer any questions, if you do reach out. That said, we are gonna be running a few audience polls during the session today, which you can upvote on via the polls tab, so please do give us your responses there. You should see a notification pop up whenever a new poll is open for responses, and you can respond by clicking on the polls tab and submitting your answer there. So on that note, I'm just gonna open up the first poll for today. And just to clarify, the other polls won't appear on screen like this one, but, you can just click on the docs tab, and you'll be able to submit your answer there. So this first poll relates to the DOJ's proposal to break up Google search monopoly by forcing them to sell off Chrome. If you haven't been following that story, we've included a link to an article from the BBC, in the docs tab, which summarizes the key points of that story. But the first poll question is, do you think anything will come of the US Department of Justice's proposal to break up Google search monopoly by forcing them to sell off Chrome? And while we're waiting for the rest of the responses to come in there, Chris, be good to just get your thoughts on that one. It's a tricky one, isn't it? I don't think Google particularly want to sell off Chrome. It's but I think they might be forced to. It really depends. I wish I was one of the flies on the wall, the Department of Justice just to understand the conversations going on. But if I was to kind of bet on it, I I would say they they are gonna, sell off Chrome. That response is in contrast to what the audience think today, and, but it will be very interesting to see, like, how that all plays out. It looks like most people think that Google will retain Chrome and the status quo will continue. And, if I'm putting my cynical hat on, I'd say that I think that's likely to to be the case, myself, but I don't actually know that for sure. So it'll be an interesting story to to watch over the coming weeks. But, yeah, that's all the housekeeping out of the way, so we'll just get into the agenda of what we're gonna cover today. So I'll just bring the agenda on screen here. So we have got 9 main points to cover. And firstly, we will be looking at the underlying reasons driving the ongoing rise in branded CPCs for many businesses, and we'll also explore these circumstances where it might not actually make sense to run branded campaigns if they become overly expensive. Next, we'll talk about the pitfalls of relying on organic rankings to drive branded sales traffic, with some interesting data from a SEMrush study on click through rates, which, you know, is very interesting, but we'll also touch on budget benchmarks for how much of your overall PPC spend should go towards brand. After that, we'll discuss why and how you might want to consider excluding brand search terms from Pmax campaigns, and how that can cause your Pmax performance data to become inflated with branded conversions. And Chris will also outline some scenarios where you might actually want to keep brand traffic in Pmax as well. Then we're going to look at a very useful script from Theodore Yordanov. Apologies if I have mispronounced your name, Theodore, but, your script that you provided is very helpful. It helps ensure that your standard search or shopping campaigns are only catching, branded search terms by reviewing daily query reports and automatically adding all the generic terms to negative keyword list. And effectively, this helps to minimize the overlap between p max and standard search so that p max is only going to be going after generic terms, while your branded search campaigns are only going to be going after brand. The link to download that script is available now in the docs tab if you can't wait, but we will be talking through the script in a bit more detail later on. And, again, I also just want to say a big thanks to Theodore for allowing me to present and share a script with everyone on the webinar today. I'm very glad to have you with us as well, Theodore. I know you put a lot of work into creating that script, so we really appreciate that. Following on from that, we will look at some real world examples of high performing branded search ad copy, and we'll be focusing on what practical takeaways you can learn from them. Then we'll look at how to maximize the visibility and ad performance with sitelink extensions. Then we'll come on to the exact target impression share bidding strategy settings you should use for optimal performance on branded search campaigns. Following that, we'll cover basic strategies to protect your brand in a competitive search landscape, and last, we'll very quickly cover the impact of removing invalid traffic from branded campaigns with some case studies from brands that we've worked on at Lineo. So as I mentioned before, when we get through all the content, we will have a q and a session with Chris, and you can ask him your own questions at the end. But please put those into the q and a tab so we can find them easily when we come on to that section. So that is it for the agenda, and I'm just gonna move on to our first slide here today. So on this slide here, you can see an article from Search Engine Land and also a a post from you, Chris, detailing and dissecting the key points that were raised in that piece. The link to that article and Chris's LinkedIn post are available in the docs tab if you'd like to check them out. But I'm just going to very briefly summarize the key points from the search engine line article, and then I'll pass over to you, Chris, to talk people through, what you were getting across in your LinkedIn poster. So in a nutshell, the article is saying that Google's ongoing push for PMax, broad match, smart bidding, that's ramping up the level of competition within ad auctions, which subsequently inflates costs and reduces efficiency. The reality is keywords that have a lower level of competition cost less, and the automated black box advertising model that Google is moving towards helps drive up the number of other advertisers who are bidding on your brand terms, meaning you pay the price if you want to secure that top spot for your own brand. The article goes on to explain some strategies you can use to keep costs down, which mainly involve leveraging the brand exclusion tool for p max and also staying on top of negative keyword list management, both of which we'll cover on, in more detail a bit later in the webinar. But for now, Chris, could you talk us through your LinkedIn post that we can see on the slide here and what you've seen across your own clients when it comes to branded CPCs throughout this year? Yeah. Absolutely. So I think, first off, the the main reason I wanted to post this was because across a lot of my clients, they had all been seeing, increases in the brand CPCs. And I I kind of dug into this, and then I saw the the sort of the journal article, And it's quite apparent that it's it's rife within this space. Just looking at kind of industry by industry, CPCs in the legal space have have kind of doubled since 2023. And in that space alone, they've gone up 10 x since 2018. So it's it's a big thing. Right? And I was trying to drill into it a little bit more to understand why that is. And and kind of the more I got into it, the more I realized that, well, more and more people are using PMax. More and more people are kind of entering these, I guess, keywordless spaces where you got the AI and the this kind of bidding strategies that are doing all the leg work for you and finding keywords and searches for the for the audience to really capture that traffic. And this whole use of just broad match, everything else is all kind of compiling, really. So whether it's intentional or not, I think we're a space where keywords that may not have been bid on or fought on, historically, that's kind of changing now. And and, I think just branded keywords or competitor keywords, whichever way you look at it, kind of areas where the tech is actually seeing opportunity to bid in those spaces to get a click. If that click is to the brand or if that click is to a competitor, whoever's kind of obviously got the right quality score, but whoever's pay prepared to pay the big bucks as well. Yeah. I mean, some of the stats from that article, you know, you mentioned the legal sector there. It is kinda crazy when you look at some of the increases there. I mean, historically, you know, that is an industry with quite high CPCs anyway, and to see those being driven up even further is, definitely presenting some challenges for, brands in that sector and other sectors with, you know, expensive CPCs. But we'll just move on to our next slide. So here, we've got another recent article about branded keywords, this time from search engine journal. So clearly, there's a lot of content going on now about branded campaigns and branded keywords. It's clearly something that a lot of people in the industry are thinking about. Again, you can find a link to the full version of this search engine journal article in the docs tab. But, basically, it kinda goes through the case for and against bidding on branded keywords in 2025 in the face of rising costs. Also, on the right hand side of the slide, you will notice a LinkedIn post from Bob from PPC Mastery, who some of you may know. That's on the left hand side there. And with that's about the recent changes to the ad auction dynamics, which put p max on an even playing field with standard shopping and search campaigns. We'll come back to that in just a second. But firstly, Chris, to get at the question the search engine journal article was addressing, are there any circumstances in which you would advise to avoid bidding on branded keywords? Yeah. I I'd potentially say for me, you'd always want to bid on your branded keywords, whether that's for profitability to use bidding on your ads, whatever. The only time or time and place where you might not want to is if it's a manufacturer that you're potentially selling and it's actually someone else's brand in a way, even if it's got your brand at the start plus then this, manufacturer. I've seen instances where people can get really funny with that. It can harm business relationships. So it's really a case by case basis. You wanna make sure that, the manufacturer and the retailer, in this case I'm talking about, are both in line with what's going on, and that you understand if someone is searching for a particular brand and retailer, where does that traffic ultimately end up? And so you you see not in this space where you've got brands, and retailers and third party other resellers all kind of competing over the space. It's a much cleaner kind of place to operate. So I'd I'd always just, yeah, go and check with with suppliers and everyone else. It's the only time I'd be wary of bidding too much on brand. But as a concept as a whole, always you don't want to be bidding where possible on your own brand name for sure. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. And we'll we'll talk a bit more about why that is in in just a second. But before we do that, just to come on to the post from Bob here. So as I said, p max now in an even playing field with standard shopping campaigns and ad auctions. Do you think this could have a potential knock on effect for branded search campaign CPCs? Potentially. I mean, we all know there's, there's a load as as this kind of thing happens, there's a load of other things that we gotta think about outside of Google. You know, you look at, the use of Chat GBT and Search GBT. These spaces are becoming more important to surface brands as well. So it's, it's gonna be an interesting space from an organic perspective. Paid is definitely the sort of the add on on top of that, but, actually, now I think there's just so many other channels people need to look at where brands could show that, actually, do we are we just diluting our time across the board? So, yeah, potentially, but I don't think it's gonna be the the deal breaker. Yeah. Yeah. It'd be interesting to watch what happens, but, yeah, it's probably not gonna move the needle, a massive amount. So, as I said, we're gonna look at some of the reasons why it is becoming increasingly important to bid on your brand terms and kind of manage those campaigns efficiently. So, if you decide, okay. We have the number one organic position. We don't want to spend a huge amount of money on branded campaigns. What are the potential downsides of that gonna be? So firstly, the main point is if there is increased competition on your brand terms driven by PMax, driven by Broadmach, then even if you have the number one organic ranking, that's gonna be appearing below the fold in the SERPs with your ads or with ads from your competitors above it. And secondly, just by having the number one organic ranking does not mean that you're gonna get every single click or even the majority of clicks that come through following a search on one of your branded terms. The amount of clicks you get on that number one organic position is lower than many businesses might expect as shown, by this data from SEMrush, and the link to the article this, graph or this data originally came from is in the docs tab as well. So what this is showing you is that even if you have the number one organic position, that listing would only get you 22.4% of the traffic coming from that search term. The number 2 position goes down to 13%. Position number 3 drops down to 10%, and then it kind of falls off a cliff after that point. So these stats alone highlight why simply having a number one organic position isn't always enough to justify not running branded campaigns, especially if there is a lot of competition in your space. And when it comes to the budget for these campaigns, it obviously depends a lot on your particular business, but a good ballpark benchmark to aim for is around 10 to 15% of your total account spend going towards branded campaigns. And if you're spending more than 20% of your overall budget on brand, it's something worth looking into as a potential source of inefficiency. As I said, every business is different, and there is no hard and fast rule that applies to everyone. But, certainly, if you are spending more than 20% on brand, you might wanna take a closer look at that. So, Chris, what are the other reasons that you would recommend running branded campaigns and dedicating, you know, up to 15% of your budget to them? Yeah. I I think the first thing to note is 15% is obviously a a big chunk of budget if you're spending, you know, 100 of 1,000 a year. So for any, anybody on Google Ads, everyone wants to spend as little as possible and get the maximum amount of of clicks that they can. So brand is a is a great way, especially branded campaigns, to understand well, firstly, again, cheap clicks if it's the right space and the right keywords, but you're getting more real estate as well. You're you're taking up the paid slot and hopefully that first organic slot. So the actual percentage chance that someone will click away, what's called zero click, they don't click on any result or click on a competitor or just another result is lower. So I've always found that the bidding on brand is great to just cement that that person will go to your website. But it's also perfect to then make sure that they're seeing a a sort of message that's relevant for them, maybe something that's more than just the meta title and the meta description. And it just means that you have another source of data to rely on as well. You can kind of see how many people clicked on your branded ads, how many impressions you're getting, and match that up to Google Analytics and Google Trends as well rather than just sort of looking at one data point in isolation. Yeah. For sure. It's, it's kinda becoming, you know, kinda nonnegotiable for for most brands. And, yeah, the reasons you outlined there, it's a solid use case to spend our budget on them. So now we're gonna come on to an interesting topic here, and it's about why and how you might want to exclude Brown from Pmax. So, the why part is answered, you know, in part by the LinkedIn post here on the slide from George Clements and Miles from PPC Mastery, and it's also kinda neatly captured in the in the meme there as well. But the the main reason why you want to keep brands out of or where you might want to keep it out is because it can inflate your data and give you a false impression of how well your campaign is doing. Branded searches have a much higher chance of converting, and if they're allowed to be eaten up by PMax, your campaign might look like it's doing really well. But in reality, you probably might have overpaid for some of those branded clicks that you could have got for cheaper through a standard search or shopping campaign, which allow you a lot more control and visibility of what's going on under the hood. And as George points out in his post, that's also going to limit your ability to use p max to drive new customer acquisition as well because too much budget will be going towards brands. So that's it for the the why part. And for the high part, it essentially comes down to using the brand exclusion tool, negative keyword list management, and also just catching all your brand terms in a dedicated standard search or shopping campaign. We'll talk a bit more about the exclusion list and negative keyword management in a sec, but in the docs tab, there is a link to another LinkedIn post from Miles. And in that post, he details exactly how he goes about excluding Brian from PMax using those three elements I just mentioned. So you can check that out if you're interested. But before we move on, Chris, among your clients, have you seen PMax performance data become inflated with branded conversions? I know you might have a slightly different opinion than Miles on on this particular subject. Yes. The well, firstly, the answer is yes. Like, the there's a lot of, branded activity that I've seen seeping to PMATs campaigns. I think it's important that we're aware of it, but, actually, I I have a bit. Yeah. You're right. I remember we talked about this before. I definitely think it's okay. And the reason I think it's okay is because I've worked with a number of clients now where having that those branded conversions in really helps the PMATs campaign in question learn about the sorts of people that are, clicky on on the ads, what sorts of people buying, where they are, what device on, etcetera, all of those kind of touch points. And it's actually helping then the generic activity to thrive and then go after people like those people. So, yeah, it it's a tricky space, Beaumax, because I've seen people that just absolutely block it. I would be all for it as long as you can then sort of have that assumption that you're gonna hit a bit of a ceiling, which is obviously the people that are searching for your brand. And anything else on top of that is gonna be generic, which is gonna look incrementally more expensive. But I would definitely keep it in because from the sort of learnings that I've seen over the past few months, it definitely helps the tech do a better job of finding new customers in the long run. Yeah. It's it's interesting that, you know, you mentioned that because I was I was recording a podcast with Scott Carothers from Journey Further, couple of weeks back now. And he was, you know, historically firmly in the camp of you should always exclude Pmax or sorry, always exclude Brand from Pmax. And he was saying similar to you, Chris. In in recent months, his thinking has changed a little bit on that. And he's came around to the idea that, you know, as long as you understand what the impact of keeping brand in PMax is gonna be, and you're not kinda misled by some of the numbers you're looking at in the performance reports, then it can make sense kind of for the reasons that you outlined there. But in the interest of time, we're just gonna move on to our next slide, which I'll go through very quickly because it's quite straightforward. So if you are going to exclude brand from Pmax and you do want to do that, the brand exclusion tool is fairly straightforward to use. If you go into campaign settings and then go to additional settings, you'll find a place to add your exclusions, as shown on the slide here. You can simply add in your own brand name. But in addition to that, you should also add in the brand names of your competitors, especially if you're running separate competitor bidding campaigns on standard search or shopping. Again, because you want to stop Pmax overlapping with those competitor bidding campaigns and inflating your costs. The goal should kinda be to ensure that Pmax is prioritizing generic, non branded search terms. And while this tool is useful, it doesn't negate the need for proactive negative keyword management. So you should still be checking the Pmax campaign insights tab and reviewing the search terms your campaign is showing for, to ensure some branded ones aren't slipping through the net there. At Lunio, we actually wrote a full guide on campaign level negative keywords for PMAX, and you can check that guide out in the docs tab. But in the interest of time, we're not gonna get into campaign level negatives, in this session, but we are going to talk about this script. So, again, thank you to Teo for this, but this script is designed to keep generic search terms out of your dedicated standard search for shopping, campaigns. And this can be done manually by reviewing your search term reports and manually adding them to your negative keyword list, but that is just very time consuming. So this script can save you literally hours of time. So, again, big thanks to Taylor. I reached out to him on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago, asked if I had his permission to share the script with the audience today, and he was kind enough to forward on me a copy, so that I could share with all you. So it is in the docs tab to go and download that. I've also included a link to his original LinkedIn post where he first shared the script. So please do give him a follow if you find this kind of script helpful. In short, here is how it works. The script runs every day and checks the search terms from your branded standard search or shopping campaigns from the previous day, and then the script adds the keywords that meet your criteria from your filtered campaigns to a negative keyword list. And the outcome is that your dedicated brand campaigns capture brand searches only as intended. So with that said, we will come on to the topic of keyword targeting. So we're not gonna spend a huge amount of time on this, Chris, but, you know, I've heard some people, that are open to using phrase match in branded search campaigns, while others say you should use exact match only. Everyone seems to be in agreement that you should not be using broad match for, branded campaigns. But what's your take on the best match type to go with, and are there any use cases where you might consider using phrase match? Yeah. Absolutely. I think I think exact match is the best place to start. It's the safest place for a brand. There are many cases, though, and I've seen this actually in the q and a, and this is something I want to talk about today anyway. So this is good timing. But there are so many cases out there at the moment where there are brands that have generic names effectively. So the 2 that come to mind, there's within the kind of the Manchester area, there's there's a betting company called Tote. As you can imagine, there's tote bags. There's a there's also the one that comes to mind is there's a sort of legal company in in Scotland called Waterman's, and, actually, that's the name of a bookstore as well. So there's a lot of nuances that you need to be really careful of, and that's why it's really important that you've got your negatives if you ever want to branch out to phrase match, that you've got the negatives in place so you can put in bookstore. And as much as you can, right, there's there's always gonna be a bit of crossover that you need to be careful of. And it really depends on, you know, if there's competitors bidding the space, etcetera. Start with exact match and then build that out from there. Obviously, you wanna get all the negatives in place for, you know, customer support and FAQs and all the rest of it. But I would be in agreement. You know, it's definitely not recommended to be on broad match. You know, broad match will just throw up a lot of effectively generic stuff. So I'd always try and avoid that where you can. Yeah. So kinda start with exact first and then, you know, make the necessary preparations if you are gonna switch on a phrase. That makes sense. So moving on from keyword types. If we're looking at ad copy, so I will look at some examples of ad copy in a second, but first, let's just talk about headlines and description. So I'm gonna present some recommendations here, which originally came from a YouTube video from Aron Young, who some of you may be aware of, and that's on the topic of branded search campaigns. You can find a link to his full video in the docs tab. Apologies. I sound like a broken record, the amount of time I mentioned in the docs tab, but there's a lot of useful resources in there. So, do go and check out Aaron's video. He publishes a lot of great content on YouTube, so I'd encourage subscribing to his channel as well. In his video, he recommends that you should lead with your brand name in headline 1, and he recommends pinning that in. And we'll say a bit more about that in a sec. The reason being that if someone is searching for your brand, the first headline they should see should be your actual brand name to maximize that ad relevance and encourage click through. He also recommends that your first description should be heavily brand name focused as well. And, also, you know, it's worth keeping in mind the fact that these are people who are already searching for your brand, so you don't need to overly sell in your ad copy, you know, in the headlines and descriptions in the same way that you would for generic searches. Then for the other headline, the description slots that you've got, you can put in your most popular products or services, and then any sales or promotions that you're currently running. So, Chris, first of all, do you kind of agree with this general framework outlined by Aaron here? Yeah. Definitely. I think it it all absolutely makes sense. Obviously, getting the brand name in brand terms is is is fundamental. The one thing that I would kind of watch out to people and, again, this comes down to a test and learn thing. Each count's different. But we all know that that pinning things, Google isn't a particularly big fan of that. So I'd kind of just play an experiment, look at what that does to the ad strength and ad quality, and and understand if is that hurting your impression share. But, fundamentally, I think you raised a really good point on these people that are searching for your brand. It's likely they already know who you are. 9 times out of 10, they already know the brand is. So really make it a a scene to give more than just what's about the meta title and the description that they might see below. Bring your, brand to life, really talk about maybe USPs that you haven't got a chance to to explore or any kind of sales that you've gone. You've got complete, creative freedom, on this space. So it can be a really good tool to really just tell them more than the stuff they're already gonna see if they were to look at the next result down. Yeah. A 100%. And, yeah, I think it is worth paying attention to getting creative here. So on that note, we'll just gonna we'll move on to look at a few examples here. So the first one that I'll bring up, so this is, on the slide here, we're looking at the organic listing for the kiss the hippo coffee brand contrasted with their branded search ad copy, and it's just worth noting and digging into some of the differences that we can see here. So on the first headline, they're adding the organic and ethically sourced, and that addition to the headline likely speaks to the more artisan coffee aficionados they likely sell to. I've never actually tried because the Hippo, I can't comment on the the coffee, but, definitely works for their headline here. And then when you look at the description, that is completely different to their organic listing as well. It's entirely geared towards giving people plenty of reasons why they should choose to buy from them over alternative coffee brands. They put the car or sorry. They put the promo code for free shipping into the description itself, which can often be a good tactic, and they've also highlighted the letterbox friendly delivery too. So really focusing in on highlighting what makes your product unique and giving people an incentive and reasons to purchase from you in particular in the ad copy, in the headline, on the description is important. This example actually comes from a longer form guide, which we wrote at Lineo a while back now about the do's and don'ts of bidding on branded keywords, which people are finding helpful because it's one of the most popular, blogs on our site in terms of organic traffic. And, again, the link to that blog is in the docs tab. But that's the example from the linear blog. So I'm just gonna move on to this next example, Chris. So I think you kind of find this, and could you talk people through what you think makes this example relevant and what people might be able to learn from it? Yeah. Absolutely. So so DJI, obviously, hopefully, people know who they are. I really want to pick this up as a space where you kind of got lots going on. It can tell you that for a manufacturer like this, a brand like this, there's lots of competitors. There's lots of people selling the same product. There's a lot of places that you can effectively buy the same thing. So it's a busy space, and this is probably a space where they're seeing, you know, heightened CPCs. You can actually see the top result here isn't actually the official DGI. So the the kind of DGI result, which is interestingly in 2nd place, really makes the most the most of having that kind of TM mark. It has the official store. It's got the sale in there, and it's also got the site links to various different products below. So I really wanted to pick this up as a a a sort of ad that, to me, ticked all the boxes. Even in that busy space, you're still incentivized to go through, because it can still compete on on price and the rest of it. So, yeah, this was the one that that stood out for me, I think, worth sharing. Yeah. It's just I mean, when I saw it, first of all, I was just like, yeah. You certainly got the point right about the business. There's so much going on there, and kind of really emphasizes why it's so important to get this right and stand out in those spaces where there is a lot of competition. So looking beyond the, you know, the headlines and descriptions, then you do need to think about site link extensions as well because they become even more important for branded campaigns. So people are actively searching for your brand, and this is your opportunity to funnel them to exactly the right place on your site. And it's also an opportunity for you to take up as much reader state as possible, above the fold in the SERPs and push your competition further down. Obviously, there is no definitive right or wrong approach here, but as a rule of thumb, that's often helpful for most brands as a starting point. You probably want to use 2 of these site links to direct people towards your best selling products or ranges of products. And as we can see from the Nike example on the slide here, they've done that with their men's and women's ranges, which makes sense. They're probably the 2 most popular parts of their sites, or their sites, sorry, in terms of sales volume. And then the other 2 site links can be reserved for promotions you're running or for underselling products, which you might want to increase the visibility of. So in this example, Nyka put a promotion in there. And, again, you might notice that they put the promo code into the description itself, which is a good tactic. And for the sake of this example, let's just assume that Nike lifestyle is an underselling range of products on their site. I don't actually know if that's true, but, if if that was the case, they would be used in that site link, extension to increase the amount of traffic that they're sending to that underselling, product range. So, Chris, are there any other things that kinda jump to your mind when you think about site link extensions and possible optimizations that that people can make here? Yeah. I think I think this is a a a good start. The the only sort of thing I'd go further with this is trying to then understand the different routes people might go down. So going deeper than just the brand name, people might be searching for the brand name plus a particular product, plus maybe even a particular size or or adding that gender. So, you know, you could potentially then if someone was searching for, you you know, men's tennis shoes, size 7, let's say, you might want to then change those site links to then kind of go into the different styles of tennis shoes or different pages that are fit for someone of a size 7, let's say. So it's a great start, but you can probably segment this down even further as well. I think the other point to go down is if you're potentially even like a b to b or lead gen company, and don't have that many pages to play around with, one thing that I know worked previously when I've looked at this is to put different sort of parameters after the URL, such as, like, a question mark and then some text. That means you can have Google effectively sees these as different pages, but you can have them showing as different site links, all effectively going to the same page, potentially with some different text or promotional material. So it's definitely worth trying that as well to see if that works for you guys. So, Chris, just to clarify, is the idea with, you know, using, those after the the question mark is sending people to the same pages, is the idea there to use different messaging in the various site links that you've got to try and give people different reasons to click through to that particular page? Is that the idea there? Yeah. Absolutely. I'd almost see it as a bit like a like a call out extension. Right? But it's a link, and it's a link to the same page. So it just gives you that more real estate in that in the kind of the Google space to say something different, say something new, and, and try and implement that. Yeah. Definitely worth playing around with. And you said in particular, Chris, that might be helpful for b to b brands with less, pages to play with? Yeah. Exactly. There might be a a like a lead gen brand that just wants to direct traffic to 1 page no matter what. So you can play around with say if it is like abc.com and that's all they want to drive traffic to, you could try doing a site link that's abc.com, forward slash question mark 123 and then having that as a separate site link. Hopefully, that makes sense. Yeah. I think that does make sense. So I'm just going to move on to the next slide here. And here, we're going to be looking at, target impression share bidding settings. So very quickly, like, here are the recommended bidding strategy settings to use for your branded campaigns. So first of all, as highlighted in the LinkedIn post from George here, you want to go with the target impression share bidding strategy to enhance your defensive position and ensure that 8 or 9 times out of 10, when someone searches for your brand name, it's your ad that they see at the top of the SERP. Next, you want to select the absolute top of page setting, not the top of results page setting. Because if you're spending the money on these campaigns, you really want to own that real estate property, be right at the top of the SERP, and hopefully get those site link extensions, go in as well to to take up even more space. So you should set your impression share target to be pretty aggressive at 90%. I certainly wouldn't go any lower than 80% there. And then for the CPC bid limit, you don't want to be too conservative here. So general rule of thumb would be to look at the average CPC for your non brand generic search campaigns, which will usually tend to be a little bit higher than your your brand term CPCs, and then set that as your CPC bid limit here. So if your average CPC for non brand campaigns is $2, then set the CPC bid limit for the branded campaign as $2 here. Chris, I appreciate that's fairly broad and generic advice, but are there any circumstances where you might want to consider kind of switching up those generally recommended settings? Yeah. The the the example that comes to mind here is that, I know of, like, a a betting company in the past where they really wanted to mix it up depending on the day of week and be super reactive at weekends. As you can imagine, at a weekend, it's super busy of of people placing bets on the football, etcetera, And they didn't want Google to just kind of hope that it would kind of be on top of it and it would go to the top impression share and it do all of that. So what they did was they they've had a number of branded campaigns, and they set a a very high manual CPC strategy for over the weekend to making sure that when competitors were being more aggressive in that space and demand was higher, they'd capitalize on that. And then through the week, they kind of give the the normal kind of ticking over, I guess, of the account back to the hands of the the bidding strategy. So I'd play around with different bidding strategy types, manual CPCs, max clicks, target impression share, and understand what works well. It's all about is it the first thing is is it about just protecting the clicks, or is it about profitability? And they're 2 very different things. So that that goal will differ depending on the business we're looking at. But but I'll just test a variety of different bidding strategies and see which works for your business. Yeah. It it is it's always a challenge to give kind of prescriptive advice in in any webinar or any kind of guide that you've given because as you point out, Chris, like, it is entirely dependent on the business, and one recommendation might work perfectly well for for one business. But if another business has a completely different model and goals that they're aiming for, you you can't really give a one size fits all. So although we are trying to give some general, advice that's kind of broadly applicable to most brands here, as you mentioned, Chris, it doesn't kind of get around the fact that you do really need to test this and experiment for yourself to really dig into what's gonna drive the best results for your particular goals. So next, we're gonna come on to auction insights. And the kinda the top level advice here is is very straightforward. But as many of you are are probably aware, it's worth keeping a close eye on the auction insights tab to see which competitors are bidding on your brand and when, because they may only be bidding against you at certain times of the day or week. And if you want more info on how to extract the most value from the auction insights tab, then, again, we've created another popular blog at Lineo on that topic, which is in the docs tab. Also, as you can see on the slide here, you should also take that list of competitors that you've discovered, you know, are bidding on your branded terms and put that list of competitors into a tool like Semrush or SpyFu, and see which other keywords they're bidding on, especially non branded keywords to check if they're bidding on some clever terms that you haven't thought of yourself yet, and that you can add into your own campaigns. Chris, you know, getting into competitor campaigns is beyond the scope of this webinar, but, are there any kind of top level bits of advice you'd give when it comes to protecting your brand if people are aggressively bidding against you? Yeah. I think that the first protocol really is just to, check-in with those guys, you know, send out an email, whether that's to their CEO or someone else just because in a lot of cases and when we're looking at PMax and when we're discussing DSA or Broad Match, etcetera, a lot of it is potentially accidental. A lot of these potential other people might be accidentally bidding on your brand name. So sometimes it might worth, you know, having conversations to be like you're intentionally doing that. Obviously, there's different things you can go down. You know, if they're using your trademark, you can raise a complaint with Google, or take that even further legally if the option is available. But I'd always just try to get a bottom of, is it accidental? Is it not accidental? And and see and go from there. Yeah. Have you have you ever run into any battles, or have you had any challenges if you have tried to get in contact with people, or have you had any difficult situations arise off the back of those kinds of emails? Yeah. I've had, some interesting stories that I probably won't be able to share here, but, yeah, it's it gets a really interesting space. It's a very competitive space. Obviously, the the intent behind these clicks is very intent based. And there's been there's many in cases where I've seen people who are not just bidding on competitor keywords and infringing on that brand, but they're making it look like they are that brand, which, you know, it's it's, it's its own thing. But, equally, I've seen situations where they don't use the trademark and and have some very clever way of putting the the name of the business or a similar sounding name of the business into the the ad copy. So I never sort of want to suggest to go after your competitors, but I've seen some quite funny examples over over the past few years. Yeah. That's it's yeah. It's a tricky issue. It's a controversial issue. And, yeah, I have seen some of those creative examples myself where the competitor isn't mentioning the other, you know, branded trademark directly, but it's very clear who they're referring to from the way that they've put the ad copy together. And in some cases, that can work quite well. But be prepared, you know, if you are going to go down that route and kind of engage in a bit in war, there is gonna be retaliation, and, you need to be prepared for all that comes along with that if you're gonna go down that route. But to just keep us on time here, before we get on to the q and a, section, I just wanted to quickly highlight some of the benefits of blocking invalid traffic specifically across branded campaigns. And there are 2 linear case studies on the slide here. One showing the results we achieved working with the wine retailer, Laithweitz, and the other is a quote from Paul Oates taken from our case study with Sykes Cottages. And the links to both of those, case studies are available on the docs tab. But, essentially, they are both highlighting different benefits of having greater visibility over both traffic quality and over I IP addresses, hitting your site through Google Ads. So firstly, if you quickly look at the Laithwaite's case study, they were working with Incubita, You are an agency partner of ours, and, essentially, the rise in their branded term CPCs was steadily eating away at their profitability across those campaigns, very much relevant to what we've been talking about today. So incubator recommended auditing their Google Ads traffic to establish baseline invalid traffic rates across their various active campaigns, and the results of that audit showed that their brand search campaigns were disproportionately affected by IVT when compared against their generic ones. So, essentially, the results you can see on the slide here, are the uplift they achieved across their branded campaigns after switching linear protection on. Again, you can read all the details, of that case study via the link to it in the docs tab. And lastly, not necessarily, you know, IVT in the way that we would typically think of it in terms of bot traffic, but this is an interesting point nonetheless. So the quote comes from Paul Oates here, and it's highlighting the fact that by having the new new in place, he and his team were able to identify that a significant amount of traffic coming through their branded campaigns was actually coming from their head office in Chester, where they had, certainly more than a 1000 employees. I don't actually know the exact number of staff that they had, but many of their staff in that head office were searching the company, weren't necessarily even aware that they were clicking on paid search ads and costing the marketing team money. But Paul and his team took our clicks log data, which tracks the IP addresses to senior stakeholders in the business and use that to put together a strong business case for blocking their head office IP, and that saved them a significant amount of budget. So if you are interested in finding out what your own current invalid traffic rate is across your brand and non brand campaigns. You can request a free traffic audit with Ooneo, where we will monitor and analyze all your paid ad clicks coming from Google Ads, and at the end, you'll find out exactly where each of your campaigns stand in terms of invalid traffic. And then you can decide what you want to do from there when you have that data in hand. The link to request a traffic audit can be found in the docs tab if you're interested. But for now, that kinda covers us for the content. And with the time that we've got left, we will address some of the questions from the q and a tab, and we will try to get through as many of those as we can in the time that we've got. So we have got 10 minutes here, Chris. So I'm just going to, look through and, I'm just gonna check for the the uploaded questions here. So this question from Jamie Carey. One sec just so I can read the full question. Would you bid on brand if there are no competitors bidding on on your brand? We've spent more on brand search before, but it was just cannibalizing organic. So, Chris, what would be your take on that? Yeah. It's a really interesting one. In in your case, Jamie, I'd say if it's cannibalizing traffic, don't do it. But I've seen many cases where there's definitely that holistic halo effect, of being able to have organic unpaid and maybe a Wikipedia page on the right and maybe some others down below. It just to me, the more, even if there's no competitors, the more space that you can have on a Google page, the less likely they'll either click on nothing or click on a generic or competitor ad or or organic, piece of material. So, yeah, I'd probably avoid it in your case. But the other thing that I've that's probably worth testing is, it might be great to try it on a a certain period of time. So for example, if you're a business that does Black Friday sales or you're pushing a particular product or you want to push a particular message, obviously, you don't just want your meta title to try and understand what's going on on the website. It's it can be quite a PPC branded ad can be a good tool to sort of direct people quickly and instantly to a certain part of the website that might be 2 or 3 clicks away from their home page. So, again, I hate I hate saying the word it depends, but it does depend on what your business is doing. And and in this case, it sounds like it's all about kind of profitability and and getting that. So it feels like in this case, I'd probably agree with you that if it's cannibalizing traffic, try turning it off. But maybe try turning it on when you're on sale, for example. Yeah. That's a that's a great point you raised, and it kind of just echoes back to that kiss the hippo example that we covered where it as you touched on your answer there, Chris, like, the real difference between the copy that you'd be using in your organic listing versus the kind of copy that you'd be using in your branded search out copy, can be quite different. And, also, if you might want to use those site link extensions, this funnel people through to the correct place even faster. Those are two reasons why it might make sense, but let's just come on to the the next question here. So for this one, which strategies work best for driving high quality leads through search campaigns in in 2025? So I would, I guess it's quite a broad question, but I'd probably look at it through the lens of branded search terms, I guess, Chris, given the the topic today. Yeah. In terms of strategies, I guess, this this applies to both brand and generic. Right? But I think, the best branded strategies and generic strategies I've seen through search, and what I think will be the future is getting high quality data back into Google Ads to make better conversion decisions. So I'm talking about things such as, like, micro conversions, if someone opens a a chatbot, link, if someone signs up to a newsletter. But, equally, if you can then start to feed back in the the GCLID data for those leads that, have been reengaged, that they've been on a demo, they've gone on loads of different pages of your website, and you can tag that up, feed that data back into Google, and sort of signal to it that these people are great. Recent example I've done on that is just a bit of a test is kind of saying, right, if someone signs up, for newsletter or does a a live chat with us, that's worth a pound. Actually, if they send a form fill or if they actually go and book a demo, let's say they're worth a £100, and then I've put that on a max revenue strategy effectively. So then it goes after more people. I'm I'm kind of giving it the quantity the quality of that person and saying, go after the max revenue. So it will still get maybe a load of phone calls or live chats, but it'll try and focus all of its attention on the bigger ticket items, which are people that are actually, you know, signing up or that they're buying from your site. Nice. Yeah. That makes sense. So let me just quickly look at the question. So the the next question is is you touched on it, briefly, Chris, but I think it's worth, covering this again. So you mentioned, pinning your brand headline. So that came from the the recommendation from the video from Aaron Young. Could that hurt impression share? So, Chris, maybe if you just want to go over again some of the potential issues that might arise if you do choose to pin pin that brand headline. Yeah. Definitely. It's it's a good question. So, from what I've seen, pinning headlines and this is more so in the generic space. Google doesn't tend to like it. So the ad quality at the top where you can kind of see it's poor, average, excellent, in some cases, it will actually if you start pinning stuff or pinning things for specific positions, it will actually hurt that score. In some instances, I've even seen it where it still says the ad strength is excellent, but naturally, the number of impressions you get seems to diminish even though maybe on an organic ranking listing, it seems to suggest it's the same time search volume search console. So you're right. It can definitely hurt impression share. Google aren't gonna tell us this per se, but I it is something, again, to test and be aware of and just try and understand. For me, I would always think that Google, on a branded term, is gonna want to put a branded piece of ad copy as headline 1 or 2 naturally anyway because it's probably gonna get the click through that way. And so I'd be tempted to leave it up to Google to make that decision unless you absolutely have to put it into position 1 or 2 and that you can't afford for it not to be that sort of thing. Yeah. That's a really good point. Probably just, yeah, exercising caution when it comes to to pinning would be would be wise. Let me just look. One sec here. So the next question that I've got here, from Joseph. Should you break the 20% of budget rule if you have a competitor that is outbidding you on your brand because they have a much bigger budget to spend? So, Chris, maybe getting into if you're a smaller player within your space and you've got much bigger rival brands and they're kind of bidding quite aggressively on you, and they've got a much bigger budget to, do that, and you're in a position where it's difficult for you to retaliate by bidding against them. How would you handle that situation? What would your approach be there? I'll try and get them to stop bidding on my brand personally, whatever route that is. You know, have a look if they're using any trademarks, etcetera. If not, I would, yeah, I would almost up that 20% that you referenced there because the the chances are that they're gonna be paying, you know, an arm and a leg for those cost per clicks, and you're gonna be paying cheaper. And the chances are your click through rate's gonna be better. And what you don't wanna do is just get to that 20% then effectively give them a ton of free cheap traffic. So the the for me, I would keep all over those guys. Make sure that try you're trying to find nuances maybe. Are they bidding more aggressively at weekends? Are they going after a certain audience type or keywords? And then try and just match or get one step ahead of those. Yeah. Let me just quickly I think we've got time for maybe just 1 or 2 more questions. So let me just look through and see, what we've got here. So interesting one here. Any advice on how to approach a brand that is both a brand and a generic term? So I think, Chris, you you might have mentioned this in in some of the examples you were raising earlier, but are there any things that people need to be aware of for for these kinds of terms? Yeah. For this one, my advice would be to just be all over your negatives, anything that's associated with this generic term. So for example, the the example before, I gave was tote bags, you know, bag, bags, anything that's related to bags, making sure that's in in as a negative, and and just start with the exact match and build it up that way. Be all over your search queries. Have a look at the auction sites like we mentioned before. And if you're starting to see auction insights from people that you wouldn't consider your competitors and actually are related to this generic term, it's probably a sign that you need to kind of review some of the traffic that's coming in, I'd say. Yeah. A 100%. So in, I'll just close with one last question, and then we'll we'll just wrap up. So just gonna share this one. So are there any emerging trends or innovations in 2025 that could transform search strategies for for lead generation? I maybe just kind of broaden out this question, Chris, to any emerging trends or innovations that you're interested in in 2025. I know you you made a LinkedIn post this morning about one of these potential trends, which, might be relevant here. Yeah. It's a big question, isn't it? It's, if I had like the secret key, I'd probably be a millionaire, but I certainly don't. But that being said, yeah, exactly that what I mentioned, like, this morning, LinkedIn, if anyone wants to go and check it out, I think Chat gbt and Search gbt are the upcoming search spaces. You know, saw an article the other day that talked about how OpenAI might be wanting to put, ads on these platforms. And I think, James, you showed me the start the other week that showed that within the US, this number of people searching, it's about 5% now searching on chat GBT. Maybe I think it was, like, 85, 80 odd percent on Google still, and then it was about 2% Bing, if I remember correctly. So it's already surpassed Bing in terms of the people from the data that are searching on ChatGbt and all the rest of it, and it's it's a very influential space. So, actually, my I'd be looking at, well, how do I get my brand recognized in ChatGPT and SearchGPT? Like, why are they mentioning these brands? And I put an interesting article on this morning that just kind of said, well, they're referencing actually a lot of websites that have affiliate links on them. I don't wanna digress too much, but you kinda get the point that I think that's Google's great, but, actually, there's a lot of learnings and a lot of other channels that we can have a look at Microsoft Ads. So Chat GBT, there's loads of other things to think about. So it's just a case of, yeah, keeping on top of news articles, seeing what's going on, seeing what people are testing, and, going after more of that and trying something new. Nice. Yeah. A 100%. I think, like, it seems likely to me that search gpt and and those kind of, large language model search functions are really gonna disrupt the industry. I know Google have their own versions of it and Gemini and all the rest of it, and they're gonna be doing their best to fight off their market share being eaten up by those other companies, but it seems almost certain that there's, gonna be some disruption over the coming 24 months, in that front. So thank you so much to everyone that submitted questions. We got through as many as we could there in the time that we had, but, you know, apologies if we didn't get to your question, but we will have to wrap up there so we don't run over time too much. But before we go, I just wanted to say a massive thank you to you, Chris, for joining us today with, so many useful insights and kind of real world applications that you've encountered from working, you know, in the industry and also with your own clients at Candu. Is there anything else you'd like to to mention and let people know about before we we wrap up? Yeah. No. Thanks for having me, James. I think that was really useful, and, hopefully, the guys here that I can see have found use from that. Nothing else to add for me. Obviously, if you have any questions or want to connect with me, feel free to to drop me a message on LinkedIn and we can, have a further chat. Thanks, Chris. And, likewise, if you have any questions for us at Lunio, you can contact us directly via hello at lunio dotai, and we'll be happy to help. As I mentioned before, if you're interested in getting a demo of Lunio and a traffic audit to see how much of your brand traffic is currently invalid. Please do use the link in the docs tab. And lastly, big thank you to everyone for tuning in either here at the live event or if you're watching back on demand. Hope to see you again in our next webinar, which will be in January next year. But for now, take care, everyone, and all the best for the rest of the busy holiday season. Thanks, guys. Cheers, everyone. Bye.