Advanced Paid Search for Branding

The motive of an Internet user to query a brand name via search engine is not easy to define, especially when enterprises have a wide range of products. It could be the interest about their products, or trying to find their stock price, or their TV ad campaign on air. Normally advertisement owner will use very general creative and drive this traffic to the company's portal index page or welcome page, but there is a risk of high bounce rate as most searchers will leave in a couple of seconds if the landing page does not have those information they want.

A marketing portfolio may have a big offline media budget, as outdoor and TV ads are expensive and have huge impressions. From the search engine side we can monitor an increase of query volume for their ads catchwords or brand names after ads go live. Since ad owners pay a huge amount of money to create awareness and generate search volume for their brands or products, it is a good idea to build a close loop on search engine to convert this golden search volume into revenue.

Based on the needs of brand marketing, public relations and online/offline ad integration, Baidu provides a new option for brand paid search. When a searcher runs a query on Baidu for a brand name or catchword of an offline ad, Brand Link will show at the top of the search result page with multiple lines of text/image and hyperlinks. Its size is 3 or 4 times bigger than the normal paid search ad. With eye-catching images alongside, no one will miss it. There is more space for detailed information, and more links to different landing pages as the following screenshot shows. Baidu clients' data show Brand LinkĄ¯s CTR is 3 or 4 times higher than normal paid search, and multi-hyperlinks will guide searchers to web pages which they are interested in, all these efforts will maximize clicks and conversion rate.

It is true that Brand Link's click volume is an indicator of other ad efforts or existing awareness, and that's why we can use it to measure offline ad performance. It is a trend for online/offline integrated ad campaigns to use short catchwords for search instead of a long string of phone numbers or URLs.