If you’ve worked on large brand SEM campaigns, you’ve likely had discussions as to what to do with branded SEM traffic. Do you spend money on clicks that you might have garnered without ads, or do you stomach the cost, albeit floor-level CPCs if you’re screaming “official site”, to ensure that you garner that traffic? These days, it takes a bit of effort just to keep your ads from appearing for branded search queries.

I’m assuming that everyone running SEM campaigns for well known brands is looking at their search traffic like this, but maybe I shouldn’t. Many brands see a 10x higher CTR and conversion rate, pushing CPCs and CPA to the floor. The trick there, is knowing what your business goals are; maximize volume at an acceptable overall ROI, or maximize net profit, possibly with a volume floor for business purposes. That’ll depend on what your metrics show you, relying on well structured and properly tracked paid search campaigns. More recently, Performance Max campaigns gobble-up branded SEM traffic, with account-level negatives being the only option.

What about landing pages? I’ve found dramatically different conversion rates testing brand traffic to a homepage and a paid ad landing page. While non-brand traffic clearly preferred the landing page(s) that we constantly tested and optimized, branded SEM clicks preferred the homepage by a wide margin. I usually lump branded SEM traffic in with organic & direct website traffic; people who know you and have come to you need one path to conversion, while people who aren’t likely to know you, who’s attention you just grabbed while they were online doing something else, they need a different funnel. It’s logical really, that people who don’t know you need more convincing, they need to hear all of your benefits and selling points. In contrast, if I do know you and I come to your door, throwing all of those points at me is annoying. You’ll find that paid ad landing pages do best with content and CTAs that are louder than what you’d consider putting on your home page. That’s partly why paid ad landing pages need to use no-follow tags and be used for paid ads only.

If you’re using affiliate networks, policing SEM for your own brand is a must. Affiliate CPA arrangements are pretty securely priced, but not if someone’s poaching your branded SEM traffic and sending it your way as their own. Google’s search preview tool still does a good job of letting you look around (your affiliate knows where you are, geographically, so look “from” somewhere else) but it’s manual and time consuming. Spot check a few different geographies now and then, it only takes a minute.

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