When building out new Search campaigns, Brand is usually the quickest and easiest build — you grab your name, some relevant variants, write some compelling copy touting your best benefits/products/services and you’re good to go. As time goes on and your account expands with new non-brand campaigns for competitors or new products or services, and new campaign types like Performance Max it’s easy to just let Brand keep riding the Search waves. But shouldn’t our goal be to consistently improve campaign efficiency, even for Brand?

When is the last time you reviewed the Brand terms you’re bidding on? When is the last time you set up an ad copy or landing page test? Is it time to revisit your Brand campaign and give it a refresh or try some new tests? Here are some key elements you may want to explore.

Brand Ad Copy

Are you still running ETAs in your Brand campaign? Have you checked their performance against RSAs? If your ETAs are still outperforming your RSAs, try taking another look at the ETAs to see if there’s any messaging that might be resonating more with users that you haven’t included (or even tried pinning) in your RSAs. If you’re only running RSAs, maybe it’s time to look at ad strength and see if Google has any helpful copy suggestions that could improve performance. Or, if you’re only running 1 RSA it might be time to set up a test with a second variant.

Has your company recently undergone a re-brand? Does your Branded PPC ad copy reflect these changes? If no recent re-brand has happened, when is the last time you sat down to review your customer personas or profiles and brainstormed what kind of messaging might be most compelling to your potential customers? Maybe you’ve launched a new product recently that attracts a younger demographic and your copy needs to be updated to reflect this shift.

Competitor Ad Copy

Have you ever done a search before and all the ads that pop up look basically the same? Same callouts, same offers, same discounts, etc. Are competitors bidding on your Brand terms? Have you looked recently at their copy to see if they’ve lifted some of your copy verbiage or something very similar to it? You’ll want to keep your copy unique and fresh to stand out from the crowd and defend your Brand space.

Landing Pages

Oftentimes, we tend to set up our Brand ads to go to our website’s homepage. If you set your ads up this way, have you tested sending your ads to other site pages instead? We did this recently with a luxury travel client and saw some amazing results.

The test was in Google Ads and tested the Homepage vs a deeper site page focused on the Luxury Tours theme. Here are some key differences between these two pages:

• The winning page has a callout box to the right outlining the 3 steps needed to complete the trip booking process vs. the homepage with a drop-down field where the user chooses the country they want to visit then they’re sent to a page with a layout similar to our winning page.
• The format/layout of the 3-step booking process is in a more succinct, vertical format in the right-hand box compared to a horizontal, more verbose layout on the Homepage; this is also partially below the fold on the hompage whereas you don’t have to scroll down to see all of the information on the winning page.
• The 5-star Trustpilot ratings are above the fold on the winning page.
• The hero image on the winning page has bolder colors and is a more compelling, eye-catching image than the subtler homepage hero image.

The winning page generated 4x the amount of leads than the homepage did for the same timeframe. Conversion Rate was significantly higher at 3.94% vs 0.90% and CPA was 66% lower. Additionally, bounce rate was 12% lower.

It’s important to note that the leads we track in Google Ads are MQLs, so our new page not only increased leads but lead quality was significantly better as well.

Match Types & Bidding

If your brand is lesser known or you’re looking to increase the volume of lower-funnel leads, you can consider running an experiment of Broad Match keywords paired with automated bidding. We tested this strategy with Max Conversions bidding in a client account against the Control campaign which had Phrase & Exact match keywords and tCPA bidding. Without the target in place, the CPA in the experiment rose above the threshold we were comfortable with, however, conversion cate was slightly higher for the experiment, and volume (impressions, clicks, and leads) was higher, so if you’re looking to boost volume this can be a good strategy to test in your account.

Text Extensions (or Assets)

Maybe you’ve launched new products or services recently. Are these reflected in your ad extensions, especially in your Structured Snippets? Maybe you’re a B2B company looking to reduce the amount of friction in gathering potential new customer info – have you tested Lead Form extensions? Maybe you’re an ecomm business and you know that your competitors are still struggling with some supply chain issues, and you’ve been able to streamline your process back to pre-pandemic times – have you added important Callouts like ‘Fast Shipping’ to your Brand campaign?

Image Assets

Google includes image extensions (or image assets as they’re now called) in RSA ad strength evaluation. They recommend at least 3 unique images as well as using both aspect ratios. Do you have quality images in place that are compelling, accurately represent your business, and would inspire a potential customer to click through and learn more about your business?

Conclusion

Ultimately, every campaign needs some regular refreshing and testing, even Brand! Carve out some time soon to take another look at your campaigns and see how you could be making a bigger impact on performance.