Google Ads Brand Keywords: Cut 80% of Brand Spend, Buy New Customers Instead

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“When you're gonna spend a specific budget, I think it makes more sense to spend it in areas where”

people are not likely to find you, but are looking for the product that you're looking for. That would, now you much, much more in-comentality, much, much more actual revenue, again, and day than just protecting the brand. This is a super easy way to reach people who otherwise are not a breach. If people are like, oh, I wonder if my account has this problem. What's the quick diagnostic for people to ask their agency, looking to their account,

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severe. It's been too long since you've been on the podcast resident Google expert senior media buyer at pilot house. And you recently wrote something pretty cool for the D to C newsletter called

“the ambiguous word inside wildflower cases paid search strategy and I think it's a great anatomy”

of kind of where branded spend can go wrong. Was this a client audit or was it just something that you were just sort of noticing in the ecosystem? This is something I think it was a good choice of study because it's something I noticed with a lot of clients. I have like a similar issue. There's I feel like two primary issues. The emphasis for this is actually Francis, our editor who loves the brand and I think like purchases from there often. And so like I think it's kind of hard to get

okay walk us through it. So this brand has a big challenge with how it's spending it's branded money. Talk to me about what you uncovered with wildflower. Yeah, I mean I think challenges is maybe harsh. Like I think they have a really strong brand. It's sisters. They put this brand together. They have massive followings on social and so like I think they have some wallet that into like a really really strong brand. Digging it to it. I do think like there's some areas where

their search investment could probably benefit them better. Like I guess there's kind of two primary

primary concerns. The first is that the company name is Wildflower, which is a great company name,

but it's also kind of like an ambiguous word, right? So if someone searches for the term Wildflower, like the chances that they're actually looking for the business. Actually there's a pretty good chance of looking for the business, but there's also a pretty good chance that they're looking for you know actual little flowers. They're looking for Billy Osh or Tom Petty or like your local bakery chain that maybe has that same name. So 2022 movie about a girl who navigates

life with two intellectually disabled parents. Yeah, exactly. All of these things. All of these things. And so it's like there isn't a way from just the word Wildflower to really get a sense of what the actual intent is that the person might be searching for. What it is that they're actually hoping to get your hands on. So they're entire budget right now, or the majority of it, according to SEM Rush,

is basically being spent on that one term Wildflower. Occasionally on the term Wildflower cases,

but the majority of the budget goes to the term Wildflower. And so like there's lots of different schools that thought on brand spend, but the thing is that like genuinely for the most part,

like they're going to find you kind of regardless, right? They already are aware of you.

The owners have a huge number of followers across social media. So when you're going to spend

“a specific budget, I think it makes more sense to spend it in areas where people are not like”

they define you, but are looking for the product that you're looking for. So if you type in something like, I don't know, like cool, I'm just trying to learn right now. Cool, iPhone cases, or something like that. Cool, iPhone 17 case. I get, and I mean, it's going to be dependent on where you physically are, and what your search history is like, but I don't actually personally, for me, see Wildflower here across any of these searches. When that right there is a super easy clean search to get.

They are super competitive in price across all of these of what I'm seeing anyways in

search right here. They have a price $79 or $65, $55. They sit right in that range. I think they're

around $65 for an iPhone 17 case. So what I would probably do is take that brand name defense investment that they're spending right now because it doesn't appear to be too many other people searching for their brand name and invest it in those kind of like battleground keyword spaces where you're likely to catch someone who might be looking for something that you need. And in that way, kind of add a lot more incrementality. A lot more usefulness to your investment online. That makes sense.

“So I just googled Wildflower. And this is something else that happened. I think because it's such a”

generic ambiguous keyword. I don't, oh, actually, no, I do see Wildflower cases is the number one organic result for me besides places. But then the sponsored result is all the way at the bottom, which is interesting. Whereas if I search cool iPhone cases, I get all the sponsored results at the top. I wonder if that's, we just Google do that when there's a word that is a bit more ambiguous.

They sort of put the organic stuff first and foremost. I don't know that I've actually seen the

sponsored results go on the bottom. Yeah. So they definitely put sponsored results on the bottom. I mean, there's a lot of things that go into where that result actually places. It could be the amount that they're willing to pay for the search. I mean, that one of the good things is like, I'm seeing there's not a ton of competition on the brand name right now. So it's just like they're probably paying like 12 to 15 cents for the search. And so it looks really great in the results.

But again, like, there's not it's going to be a ton of incrementality. They'll show on the bottom based on how much they're paying based on the relevance to your particular search, based on the likelihood for you to actually click on that ad, which I don't know if this is your style of phone case. It might not be, might not be showing up so hard for you. For my daughter, maybe,

“I think my daughter might, she's I'm going to show these and I don't really need her liking 65”

dollar phone cases. But wow, what's there enough? What are they made of? That's crazy. I guess that's kind of looking at the results now. I guess people are just everything costs more, including phone cases now. I think so. Yeah. And I mean, again, like looking at they're pretty competitive at 62 dollars. I mean, that seems like a lot. But for these styles of cases, some that are like a little bit more unique, a little bit more fun. And they do seem to be pretty high quality. Don't call me. I

don't actually try one. But they do seem to be pretty high quality based on the research that I've done. And so like, yeah, I think this is like market price right now. So it's it's an interesting one. They're sort of like, maybe in an embarrassment of riches kind of position where A, they've got their traffic coming from a lot of other places. This isn't a huge brand spend, I guess, $3,500 a month is pretty pretty low, I guess. And like you say, they are getting

the keyword probably pretty cheap because there's no other competitors. So even so in the results, even though there may be overspending on this term, they still probably have good metrics from it. But my question is, with $3,500, where would you better allocate that to get more incremental growth than they're currently getting from the strategy? Yeah, two places. I mean, search and shopping across all of those keywords that I kind of mentioned before. You know, cute phone cases. I would hit

the brand name of every popular phone right now. You know, I phone 17 case. I phone 16 case, you know, Samsung Galaxy S23, even if they're on now case. And I think like all across all of those keywords, you're gonna capture people because again, like those searches are, I'm not catching a lot of wildflower in those searches. I am getting a lot of other brands that are selling at similar price points. You want to be able to get in the mix. And then the more specificity you

can add to the search. So it's like people who are looking for a specific search. Maybe pink, iPhone case, you can have them drop on the pages of just pink. Or for a specific phone, just drop them on the landing page for that phone. It looks like the majority of their eyes actually just drop on the home page, which makes sense when you consider that the majority of the searches are for the brand name. But yeah, adding a bit more specificity across the mix, dropping people exactly

where they want to be and hitting them with something that is highly relevant is going to definitely net you more incremental revenue, just from people who otherwise would not have found you.

collab first brand. How does that affect what you do in the feed versus being a catalogue focus

brand? I guess there are a couple of ways that you could change. You could change your approach based on that. Depending on the collapse that you're running, who you're running your collabs with, like, ah, they have a ton of things. I don't know who that hugs in is. Oh, I see. I'm just letting you use a ton of popular influencers, Charlie and XCX. It's useful because you can use those terms, which adds their specificity, but also have their own kind of like built-in popularity.

And you can use those in search as well. So like people who are huge fans of Charlie XCX, and then you can, you know, tag phone case on to that. You can try to capture any sort of like particular moments, because they, again, they don't have a ton of popular influencers. We're probably blowing up all the time. You can capture like moments, specific things that they've done,

“like there is a ton of built-in traffic in around a lot of these collabs. And I think like you”

should, you could use that really to your advantage as a brand. And I think like depending on, yeah, depending on the types of collabs that you're doing, and then how popular those tend to be online. Like, I would just piggyback off all of those terms, specifically looking at shopping, because like those are the people who are getting ready to buy. And this is also a price point where it's relatively easy to have someone pull the trigger. Like there isn't, there isn't necessarily

need to be 30, 40, 50 days away time. It's not like a $2,000 have a sort of product where people too, you know, people want to review, people want to price match. I think like, yeah, people see something they like. The other, one of the other point of view is you had was the worth it aspect of like our wildflower cases worth it. And right now, all of those search terms go to reddit, where you're kind of left on the whims of the reddit community. And there's a lot of people

“ripping apart that are, oh, they're not worth it. You can get it cheaper, blah, blah, blah. So what would you do”

in with with that sort of keyword string? Yeah, those are, those are unique ones, because

you will always be overrun by right it, by the like forums of the world. And like depending on

there, there are so many potential searches that you can capture. And I guess there's like kind of two core ways of doing it. You can, you can try to rely on, I mean, for the, for the near future, DSA campaigns are dynamic search ad campaigns are kind of going away. But it might be a good idea to try to capture kind of like those sort of broader terms with an automated search campaign. You can use dynamic search ads to land people on, if you have like an FAQ page, or if you have

like, I mean, they have a really, really massive YouTube where they showcase a lot of the product and a lot of kind of like they're standard social media at daily lives. And I think like that's a perfect opportunity to actually show people the case. If you can drop people on a video like that, or yeah, if you can get your like FAQ page in the mix across like those sorts of Reddit posts that people tend to search for, you can try to take control of the conversation.

And I do think like, maybe this is like having a really strong product, obviously is going to be like you and just making sure that you're focusing on that. You know that feeling when you're pouring money into social and it feels like you're just fighting everyone else for the same feed space? What if we told you that adding TV to the mix doesn't just add a new channel, but it makes all your other channels work harder. Your social performs better,

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doubled, terms apply. Head to universal ads.com to get your brand on TV today. One of the other things you point out is how much they've invested in YouTube and in their video assets, but how their YouTube account appears to be unconnected to their ad approach.

“How would you go about managing that? I think that's probably a major risk because again, they”

have a massive YouTube following. Like, I type wildflower cases in YouTube. I think they've got like 20, 30,000 followers. Maybe more than that. And so like, yeah, 21, 21,000 followers just about, 21,000 subscribers. Like, hundreds of thousands of views per video here. Like, I think connected, I mean, again, connecting those two, like just having, having ads. And you know what they actually

their standard videos. But then you can easily dump those videos into a performance max campaign

into a demand-gen campaign. And you can use videos that already have a ton of popularity. There are already being monetized on YouTube to kind of just drive more visibility, more awareness, and areas where especially if you're if you're combining that with like some retargeting campaigns, retargeting ads, you can capture people who were already like getting ready to buy adding to cart. Those are going to be the things that actually like move the needle and it comes to your

conversion rate. So like at that bottom of funnel with people who are already kind of like considered. Okay. So they are going to listen to this podcast and they're going to call you and say, "Zav, we need to be your client and you have 48 hours to fix this. 24 hours to fix this. We don't

“want to raise our budget. We still just want to spend $3,500 a month. How do you get the brand spend?”

Or limit the brand spend to make sure you're not over because it's like 99% of what they're spending

is on these branded keywords now. So walk me through just as simple as possible what you would do with that $3,500 in 24 hours. Oh geez, I would probably cut 80% of the brand spent. I would re-dedicate that to a really strong, really well segmented shopping campaign. And then I would add a layer on top of that in generic, generic search campaign. Just targeting those high-intemp keywords. So people who are likely to buy that don't feature wildflower in any way. You could also work with

some of those cloud keywords to Charlie Xiex's of the world that they collab with cute iPhone cases. It's like fun iPhone cases pink. iPhone 10 to 18 all the way through all the popular Android cases. Anything that you have that either moves well or is popular right now. And to be honest with you at $3,500 a month, you could probably just work with those core elements and create a really, really strong and tent-ful incremental search campaign. Two campaigns, maybe three at most,

just running those core elements. And like that would, you much, much more incrementality, much, much more actual revenue again in the day than just protecting the brand. You might see the roll-ass go down in that case, I imagine, because they're bidding on just their keyword and they're getting at such a cheap price. So you actually might see your roll-ass go down but your revenue go up. Is that right? Yeah. So it's kind of funny because the, I feel like the

in account roll-ass isn't really going to tell the story. Isn't really a tough-a-ful story, right? Like, yeah, of course if you're betting on brand terms, it's going to look really great. Your CPC's going to be a smallest possible. Your click-through rate's going to be as high as possible. All of those kind of core metrics that we're all trained to watch are going to look better. But at

“the end of the day, like when you're looking at your real-world revenue, the truth is like the”

majority of those people who are coming through the brand campaigns, who typed in wildflower cases and then found you, they were going to find you regardless of of your ad. There are situations where if you have a ton of competitors, people are bidding on your brand and they are likely to see a competitor ahead of you on your brand name. Then yeah, there's definitely an argument to be made to increase some brand spent just for pure brand defense. But in this instance, so it's not really the case.

Do you think is there any-- because I'm sure if you search wildflower cases, they're probably bidding on that as well. But there's still some-- you'd still leave some small budget to just show up on the super generic keyword wildflower. But like you say, like 80% less than they're currently spending. Yeah, I would say so. And I mean, you really just do that. There's a couple-- I mean, there's a few reasons to do it. One is by having that keyword in your account, you can just monitor it.

You're aware of who else is bidding on it. You have an idea. If anything ever happens, it spends increase if competition increases. You have an idea of just who's there, who's in the mix. But I think like, yeah, when it comes to actually driving revenue, when it comes to actually capturing customers that you otherwise would not have captured, growing your customer base beyond kind of like your-- your TikTok following or the clubs that you manage. I think like this is a

super easy way to reach people who otherwise would not have reached. It just some quickfire close questions I hear. What's one metric? You think agencies over report to clients? There's probably a-- there's probably a-- I think I think attributed revenue. Like, I mean, I know that that's the basic answer, but I think like ultimately that's kind of like

what it all comes back to. And it's always a struggle to understand like where every dollar came from.

But I think like just it is kind of like the nature of the platforms themselves that they are

“going to try to maximize their recorded revenue. And that's why I think like we get a little bit”

to caught up in looking at like a platform revenue looks great or you know, the roll-ass through this campaign looks great. But what is it really affecting like downstream? Is I think like what

And just with the wildflower case, $3,500 seems like a-- I actually don't know how big there, but it sounds like they're growing. They've got a lot of reviews. Probably doing some good revenue.

“$3,500 on Google seems pretty low budget for a brand like that. Is would you say that's accurate?”

And would you say that what your-- the methods that you're laying out and the changes that you'd make to this account would allow them to earn a lot more-- like you've said, incremental revenue

from the platform. And would that push-- would you-- like I know agencies always want budgets to

go up. But would you suggest that they-- you know, it gives them more room to be more aggressive and grow more on the Google suite of tools? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I-- I guess like selfishly I would but I would probably double that bite in and I think like there's a ton of value in doing that. I mean, it really depends on what they are hoping to achieve like yeah. And Google for this kind of process is like an amazing opportunity. I think to try to grow it, it's amazing opportunity to go

from zero up to something. They obviously already have a built-in following that was like super helpful to get there. But again, as I mentioned, like a lot of people, I mean older people or like there's

“just a ton of people who aren't in the spaces that you are. So I think like Google Ads is a great”

equalizer because everyone has to come here at some point or another. If people are listening to

this and like, oh, I wonder if my account has this problem. What's the the quick diagnostic for a people to kind of look to ask their agency look into their account to make sure that this isn't happening to them? The easy one is just to try to find out the percentage of spend going towards brand versus generic keywords. Now, it will really deeply depend on the agency that you work with or who's managing your campaign. So those might not be easy to split out, but it's a super quick

easy way to do it in the actual platform is, I mean, there's probably a few ways, but I would go to the search terms. I would grab all of the brand terms that you can. It could be a long list. Filter to those and just see the percentage of spend that's going to those keywords. If it's over, like, again, it will depend. It will depend on how many, how much competition you have in the space, how much your keywords cost, what's the AOV of the item? You know, but I would probably want to

keep that number roughly to like, maybe 20%. And I even hesitate to say that number because like, there is so many instances where that's not the number that you'd want to keep. But I'd say for most businesses who aren't seeing a huge amount of competition on their brand terms and who have a name that is relatively unique and specific to their business and their field. Then yeah, 20% is probably a fear. And when you did that, you'd want to monitor that they're getting,

“because right now they're spending 80% of their budget or more on those branded key terms.”

And essentially what you're saying is if you were to take that down to 20 or something, they probably wouldn't see less revenue, especially if you reallocated it to better keywords. So like, when you do something like that, when you make big changes like that, are you, I guess you're monitoring how much revenue they're generating? And if you're able to show them, hey, we can generate the same amount of revenue from 20% of the spend,

it's going to be a win-win. But it's when you do that, are you monitoring the results of kind of what happens to make sure you haven't undone something? Yeah, you definitely need to. You want to be watching constantly your auction insights reports to see kind of like where you're laying in. Are you losing ground to competitors if you have any auction with you? One of the good things about a really strong brand campaign is that if you can really isolate the best performing brand keywords,

you can maximize, I mean ideally you are using value-based bidding, you can maximize a value of each conversion. You will slightly see your lowest through your brand campaign, go up significantly. You can do a lot with a little bit of spend on your brand name because again, CPCs are so low, conversion rate is so high. You can really push those types of campaigns to perform active fast. And then again, you can take the rest of that money and reinvest it elsewhere

with people who otherwise would never have heard of you, otherwise would never have been a customer,

and that's a net new person with ideally some empty via touch. Love that. So if you're listening to this podcast and you know, first of all, if you know the wildflower people send them this podcast, I'm going to, I might try to find them and send them to this because just so I get some free cases for my daughter. And if you want a Zav or anyone on the crack Google team at pilot host to take a look at your account and make sure that this isn't happening to you, you can just reach out at pilothouse.co.

And just tags Zav. I'm sure that, you know, I'm sure you'll be happy to take a look at their account. All right. Thanks for coming on again today, man. Thank you. See you. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you're not a subscriber to our newsletter, you can do that right now at direct to consumeralloneword.co.

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