Today’s digital marketers are inundated with customer data. We spend countless hours analyzing this data to better understand our consumers so we can reach them at the exact right moment. Let Bing take some of this work off of your plate and check out this presentation from Microsoft’s Itir Aloba-Curi and Angela Bahreyni. Originally presented at a Boston SEMPO event in November 2016, the presentation includes findings from Bing’s recent Consumer Decision Journey study and addresses the value of brand bidding.
8. Yes, some paid clicks you may have received anyway.
But you also received 23% incremental clicks!
70%
Organic Only
Brand ad + Organic
51% 19%
Incremental clicks
from brand ads
OverlapYou
You
23%
9. Bidding on your own brand terms =
fewer clicks to competitors
Organic Only
Brand ad + Organic
93%
You Your Competitor
Your CompetitorYou
70% 30%
7%
19. Upper funnel
is important:
• Focus on both the
journey and
destination
Consumer Decision Journey Key Takeaways
Timing is
important:
• Leveraging search
strategies like images
and re-marketing to
reach consumers
during different
stages
Personalization
• Ad copy &
audience targeting
19
Incremental: To bid or not to bid on your brand terms? This is not a new idea or a quest and it has been a discussion point since the early days of search. I know all of you are search marketers and you probably have a lot of clients with a strong brand presence and may choose to rely on organic traffic to pick it up your brand demand. This is something we wanted to better understand leveraging all the rich data we have on our platform and better understand the exact impact of turning your branded bids on and off, especially within the competitive space.
We analyzed the top 3 tax advertisers during the tax season, between January and February 2016
98 different brand queries with commercial intent
keywords across over 50 million impressions.
On average, we see ~70% of click
Clients who turned off their branded ads and only relied on their organic listings received 70% of their branded search clicks.
When these advertisers turned on their branded ads, they saw 32% gain in clicks. You are probably asking yourselves, did these advertisers cannibalize their SEO by bidding on your branded terms? Did these additional clicks come at the expense of free clicks?
Yes, Some paid clicks you may have received organically
There was an over lap of about 19% but this overlap moves your relevant content to the top of the page where a pre-dominant amount of clicks occur for branded queries
But look at the gain here, 32% gain in branded clicks. The big question you have to ask is how did the competitors of these advertisers benefit from them turning off their branded paid terms?
7% of their branded terms to their competitors with paid search compared to 24% without.
What we saw is advertisers who bid on their branded terms aggressively, mainline 1, only gave 7% of their branded terms to their competitors. Where it gets really, really interesting is how your competitors benefit when you don’t bid on your brand terms. ¼ of the branded clicks of these advertisers got taken by competition. A significant amount of your branded traffic being taken by your competitors. This is your competitors eating your lunch.
Advertisers who bid on their brands in addition to SEO, get more traffic, keep their competitors in control and get to have more control compared to just SEO. We also did the same study on the retail and travel advertisers and saw very similar results.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could calculate exactly what the branding opportunity looks like for you in Bing ads?
I’ve tried presenting this work from a higher level process view, but found that it’s somewhat difficult to explain without an example. For today, I thought we could dive into an example we pulled together for the travel vertical
Not to mention, the Boston winter is approaching, so vacationing is pretty top of mind for me at the moment
The first interesting view that we look at review the duration in which takes a user to complete their “journey”
OK so I did an airquote for journey because I just got done telling you that we don’t pull information from your specific accts, so how would I get a conversion? Here we define a conversion as a users final activity that relates to the CDJ … for example, if a user queried vacations in Maui every day for a week then all of a sudden stopped we could assume this person has “converted”
Search plays a key role in driving users
Here we can look at the relative number of users that searched for or visited these sites
We can also layer in user interest metrics such as PVs and time spent
Only 9.5% of users used 1 OTA
On average, users visited 5 OTA domains
Consumer Stages
Where do you fall within a consumer’s search journey?
Is the consumer reaching you throughout all stages of their journey?
Action:
When are consumers discovering you and how can we optimize ad copy to engage that consumer?