Paid Search: Setting Your Trademark PPC Keyword Net

Originally published on eCommerceConsulting.com here on 01/28/2014

Your trademark terms and brand name are crucial to your company.  You may even hire lawyers to defend and protect them from interlopers.  Essentially, your trademarks are your identity, and that includes your domain name.   Now, I’m sure you do some paid search targeting around your trademarks in order to protect them from poachers, but do you also protect your trademark in other situations?  Do you use your trademark paid search to create a retargeting effort for users looking to return to you?  If not, you should, and here is how to go about setting up your trademark net.
When people begin a search, they do so in the hope of finding what they are looking for and where they want to buy it.  This could look something like this:

1^st search – “cake pan”

After this, the user will refine their search as they learn more information about what they may specifically want:

2^nd search – “deep cake pan 8 inches”
3^rd search – “round deep cake pan 8 inches”

Ok, now the user knows what they want, but from where?  Well, chances are they came across several places to purchase it, but which did they choose?

4^th search – “williams sonoma round deep cake pan 8 inches”

Now, Williams-Sonoma could pay the larger click cost for the keyword “round deep cake pan 8 inches” or they could have set up a trademark net keyword campaign and be catching this search with a trademark in the mix and paying a fraction of the click cost vs. having the non-branded term trigger the ad– or worse, a generic trademark ad that links the user to the homepage.  Not only that, they could present additional options using sitelinks specific to cake pan shoppers based on data from their very own website and cake pan merchandiser.  These sitelinks could be top brands like “OXO 8” Cake Pans” or “Stoneware Cake Pans” or related goods like “Top Rated Cake Spatulas” or “Cake Recipes for 8” Pans”.   Picture a robust trademark long tail ad like this:

 Round 8-Inch Cake Pans

Check out all of our great 8-inch

Cake pan options.  Williams-Sonoma.

Williams-Sonoma.com/Cake–Pan

OXO Cake Pans        Stoneware Cake Pans

Round Pan Cake Recipes       Top Rated Cake Spatulas

This ad not only provides the user additional options, but saves the customer time to find the specific product and saves the organization budget since this was specifically a branded search terms.  To boot, by using the sitelinks intelligently, this ad not only calls out a top-selling brand, but also content and a potential add-on item, all directly from one search ad.
Now, you may say, “They should already have high SEO rank for a search like that.”  You’d be right.  The bigger question is “Who else is bidding on these terms that will push the Williams-Sonoma SEO listing down the page?” and “Will the SEO listing provide additional options for the customer AND expose their targeted content AND a cross-sell?”  Ok, think about it now…

Would there be other brands’ paid ads showing up all over the page?  Yes, several.

Did the organic listings provide all the additional content made available by the example ad shown above?  No, just a few different cake pan category pages.  So the class on the “Essentials of Baking & Pastry” and the recipes for cakes that use a round cake pan are not exposed to the potential customer.

The essentials of a really good trademark net paid search campaign can be made pretty simple:

Create many micro trademark campaigns that combine your trademark with various category and product keywords.

1. Add synergistic sitelinks to these campaigns based on the product or product line presented with the trademark.
2. Consider additional content that could be exposed AND be helpful to a potential customer.
3. Write these ads as if they are a retargeting touch to the searcher, since chances are they are.
4. Set the max bids for these keywords higher than your generic trademark or generic keyword counter-parts, since, thanks to your ownership of the trademark, what you will pay will be a much lower click cost.
5. Use Exact match and Phrase match types, as these will provide more data in the long run and may make it easier to identify new affinity trends.
6. Make sure your sitelinks have detailed tracking so you can use this data to inform future content and cross-sell options.  (Also, this is just a great way to use PPC to test complementary content that can be used to better your SEO).
7. Launch it.

You can start out as broad or narrow as you want with your trademark net.  The key is just having one, and the great part of paid search is the ability for rapid change and quick data reads.  Rapid change means the sitelinks can be changed out for seasonal trends, and the quick data capture can be used to inform your SEM Manager, your merchandisers, your content team and even your marketing agencies about what is working, what isn’t and potential gaps.  Now go and build your trademark net…or have your agency do it, but don’t leave it on the table for someone else, after all, it is YOUR trademark, YOUR business identity we’re talking about here.