When working with national and international Fortune 1000 clients, I often observe that their brand is so strong that it provides 80% of the conversions at 20% of the total budget spent (the Pereto principal at its finest). This is where the Internet marketer enjoys the fruits of the traditional marketer’s labor. No, all of those overpriced archaic billboards on the side of the freeway were not a total waste. Those expensive advertising agencies who charge like a battalion of lawyers to come up with a tag line of three simple God-like words (Just Do It) will help your Pay Per Click efforts immensely. First we must see what all the fuss is about, and then we can see when one should abstain from branded terms.

Paid Search for the household name is all about synergy. Headlines in your text ad like “As Seen on TV” and “Found at Your Local Mall” are usually great indicators that your branded terms will successfully carry the weight of the paid search efforts. These branded terms give you an ROI buffer to go after those terms with higher volume and lower return of investment.

Just because your brand logo isn’t more recognizable than the Son of God doesn’t mean you should not be bidding on your own name. Just expect a much lower search volume. Your brand name is arguably still the most qualified bucket of keywords to bid on. It indicates that someone has already heard of you or even done business with you in the past. Even if you are ranked number one in the natural listings, it is a good idea to have a paid search listing. It gives you the chance to say exactly what you want to say to the searcher at a moment’s notice. You could run a special promotion in an instant instead of having to wait for the spiders to re-crawl your site with no guarantee that your Meta description will turn out the way you have planned.

So we have explored when branded terms do a great job; let’s dive into when they may not be your best bet. There is a very specific behavior that is the scourge of paid search marketers. If one of your clients has a service that warrants daily revisiting of your site (once the client is acquired), then branded terms might turn out to be a big waste of money. What the heck am I talking about? To clarify we will start with an example:

A company offers a free email service. Terms like “free email” work very well for this client. They have a high conversion rate because that is exactly what they offer. But their brand name does not lead to a high conversion rate because these people who are visiting the site are actually members, and are just looking to sign into their email account. They happen to click on a paid search ad because they don’t know the difference between the organic listing and the one you just paid for. Yes, there are some people looking for email services with this particular client by name, but this is a case where branded terms do not yield the rewards expected.

It’s rare to come across exceptions to the rules, but I always like to share them with the community who might find them interesting.