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Branded incrementality measurement for top healthcare company

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  • Services

    Analytics

PROBLEM

Should you advertise in search on your own brand name?

I’ve been doing performance marketing for about 12 years. Whether one should advertise on branded keywords has been a conversation ever since. 

The don’t do branded search camp argues incrementality – why advertise and pay for clicks on your brand name when someone already is searching for your brand? The do branded search camp also argues for incrementality – a competitor can advertise on your brand name and steal that branded search query from you if your ad is not there.

What does it boil down to? It depends. I think both can be right or wrong, depending on context. Only a test can prove or disprove it, here’s how you can do that (if you are already running paid search brand).

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SOLUTION

First, a country with substantial branded search volume was selected. 

Then we did a forward looking projection on organic brand clicks, corrected for seasonality. These are the clicks that you would have received via organic if you would still be live with paid search brand in that forward-looking time period. Made a similar projection for paid search brand, these are the clicks that you will lose as you.

Subsequently we paused branded search in that country. Two things will happen:

1. Paid search brand clicks will drop to 0. We have a forecast in parallel, these are the clicks we would have gotten if we didn’t pause. We will refer to this is “lost paid search brand clicks”

2. Organic search brand will start to uplift and we have the forecast for organic how many clicks we would have gotten if we would not have paused. We will refer to this is “uplifted organic clicks”

We then compared the uplift in organic clicks (organic clicks actuals - forecast) versus the drop in paid search brand (forecast) . E.g.

We have 5000 uplifted organic clicks in our experiment period (actuals - forecast)

We have 6000 lost paid search brand clicks in our experiment period (sum of what was predicted)

Thus, by pausing paid search brand, organic captured +5K but we lost -6K. So in total, it means that 1K clicks were lost. 1K clicks are the absolute “incremental” clicks of paid search brand during the experiment.

Impact

The incrementality experiment showed that branded paid search was not fully incremental, and that a large part of this volume migrated to organic search for when it was paused. As a result, it turned out that the efficiency and ROI of branded search was at a much lower level then expected. A callibration point was made with in-platform performance and the outcome of the incrementality experiment. Subsequently, investments in this channel were adjusted to reflect these new returns.