How To Boost Brand Exposure On A Fixed Budget

It’s easy to increase brand presence in search… if you have the budget. But more often than not, search marketers feel trapped by their fixed budgets, and wonder how they can possibly increase branded reach without spending more money. However, it can be done. Online visibility is directly related to how many times your ads […]

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It’s easy to increase brand presence in search… if you have the budget. But more often than not, search marketers feel trapped by their fixed budgets, and wonder how they can possibly increase branded reach without spending more money. However, it can be done.

Online visibility is directly related to how many times your ads appear in the search results, which is directly related to your budget and bidding strategy. Usually, the more money you spend, the more often you appear. But there’s a way around this dynamic.

One way to overcome this problem is through match types. Match types are used to further segment your audience and qualify your click traffic. As your search traffic becomes more and more qualified, the engines will begin to reward you by lowering your costs little by little.

Using this simple rule of the engines (the more relevant you are, the less you pay); marketers can lower their branded costs by strategically using match types to qualify their traffic.

How Match Types Can Help

Catie noticed that her client’s brand awareness had dipped. Naturally, she wanted to rectify the situation. However, she knew that she wouldn’t be able to get additional budget.

So she set up an experiment with her existing brand campaign. Her effort tapped into the different match types available in search, and the various budget tools Google offers.

Over the course of three months, Catie was able to boost her client’s impression share by 70% (See below graph). In addition, her efforts increased her client’s ROI by 71%. Moreover, she was able to achieve these results without spending an additional penny.

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Increase impression share with a strong match type strategy.

5 Tips To Get The Job Done

If you need to increase your brand’s presence in the search results without spending an extra penny, the below tips should help you get started:

  1. Indentify and separate keywords. Even within brand campaigns, there will always be a few keywords that outperform the rest. Review your performance data and identify your top performing keywords. Then place them into their own separate campaigns. This will give you granular control you need to boost efficiency.
  2. Leverage match types. Set up your branded campaigns to run across the various match types: Broad, Phrase, and Exact. This will help you capture as many branded impressions as possible. Be sure each campaign includes all of your top performing keywords. This step helps you maximize your branded reach.
  3. Spread the budget around. The costs associated with each match type will vary. For example, Broad match terms are usually more expensive than Exact match. Therefore, you should designate a larger portion of your budget to the Broad match campaign, a lower percentage to the Phrase campaign, and an even lower percentage to your Exact campaign.
  4. Accelerate your spend. Set your Exact match campaign to accelerate spend. The engines will serve out the Exact match first since they are the most relevant match to the search query. Because there is nothing more exact than Exact match, these keywords will be served up before Phrase or Broad match. Exact match CPCs are always lower than Phrase and Broad (and your Exact match campaign is made up of your top performers). This approach will help you save budget that you can reallocate to your Phrase and Broad match campaigns. This extra budget savings allows your campaigns to run longer throughout the day, thus increasing your brand presence.In addition to spreading your branded campaign longer in the day, you will probably see increased conversion metrics on the back-end. On average, Exact match types yield strong back-end performance metrics.
  5. Don’t forget negatives. To keep the engines from matching your Broad and Phrase match campaigns to your Exact match campaigns, use negatives. Take your top performing Exact match keywords, and be sure they are on Negative Exact match within your Broad and Phrase match campaigns. This simply keeps all three campaigns from cannibalizing one another.

Brand presence is very important in the digital search space today, but boosting its performance doesn’t always require an increase in budget. Match types can help you get the job done without incurring additional costs.


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About the author

Andrew Wilson
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