Should You Be Running Branded Ads?

Branded ads: are they a waste of money, or the smart choice for advertising?

Short answer: it depends.

Longer answer: Here are three different scenarios for when you may or may not want to use branded ads.

Scenario #1

Let’s start with a professional services firm like ParaCore. This is our branded ad. When you type in ParaCore, you get our ad. You also get our organic listing, Google Plus listing, or MyBusiness listing, plus several videos down here. So, ParaCore pretty much owns the page.

When you’re running a branded ad, it gives you much more control over the information you’re seeing. Here, you can see the title, a few different title lines, description, location, and a couple of site link extensions. I to control this content 100%.

A branded ad also improves the accessibility of your business to the general consumer. When someone is on a mobile device, they can click to call, or for directions.

Branded ads are, I think for us, less than a dollar a click with a couple of hundred dollars a month ad spend. It doesn’t cost that much, but it creates strong brand awareness and stronger brand recognition. People can see a much bigger ad, more information about your company, and you can control what you’re showing the consumer.

Scenario #2

Now, another example, we run marketing for different schools. So, when someone is looking for a massage institute, you want Cortiva to pop up. However, since a massage school is such a large purchase, plus there’s only a handful in a certain region, when you type in the name of the massage school, I don’t think it’s important that a branded ad exists. Unless, of course, you want more brand recognition like with ParaCore.

But from a performance perspective, if someone’s typing in Cortiva and you’re the first result, it might be costing you a lot more if it’s a high-volume brand. Plus, it’s not incredibly helpful to have the branded ad at the top of the page if you have a student calling who’s already a student, for example. You’re basically advertising to someone that already knows who you are.

Here’s another example. Property management companies need to find property owners who are looking to rent their property. They don’t have trouble finding tenants in today’s market. So, if you buy a branded ad on a property management company, you are opening yourself up to get a lot of tenant calls, from people that already know who you are.

If you put it on a property management company, you’re getting calls from people that have maintenance requests or need to pay their bills or have a complaint. So, for property management, we’ve pulled off all branding ads and it’s just about property rentals in Phoenix.

Once someone’s engaged with you, and they already know your name, it’s not as important to buy branded ads to reinforce that.  To some degree, it’s wasted spend.

Scenario #3 

A company like Mister Sparky, a residential electrician. Here, you could have the same argument as the last time: if someone’s looking for an electrician and they don’t know who they want, they type in Phoenix electrician.

You want Mister Sparky to show up, and you want people to learn about the brand, click the landing page, and contact you. You’re acquiring a new lead through someone that didn’t know who you were. You could also argue that if someone types Mister Sparky, they already know the name, so the branded ad isn’t necessary as we discussed a second ago.

There are two points to consider on that one. On one hand, here is Mister Sparky’s corporate page. They’re a franchise, so you don’t get the local Mister Sparky as your first search result. You do get this map, which has the local Mister Sparky locations, and then it rolls into home advising. In this case, the franchise has more weight, even though it’s a location search.

On the other hand, Parker & Sons are trying to steal the traffic for people looking for Mister Sparky. Since Mister Sparky didn’t do a branded campaign, instead Parker & Sons shows up.  So people, especially on their mobile devices, might see Parker & Sons first and choose to contact them instead.

So, those are three different scenarios, and here’s a summary of everything we’ve discussed:

• If you want brand awareness and your name to take up the most in search results, branded campaigns are not expensive on a cost-per-click basis. 
• If existing customers are the ones who constantly contact your place of business, you don’t need to buy branded ads.
• That said, if competitors are actively looking to steal your traffic, you might choose to introduce a branded campaign just to be at the top of search results. Even then, I might argue against it because poaching traffic this way is extremely difficult!

Need some additional advice? Reach out to us!