Branding in PPC sucks -- but it doesn't have to

In my inbox this morning, the latest eMarketer article appeared on Online Marketing Effectiveness. Great topic. They revealed a couple of excellent results from Forbes’ 2009 Ad Effectiveness Survey:

• most effective online marketing tactic for generating conversions;
• most effective online marketing tactic for affecting brand perceptions;

For generating conversions, the top 3 tactics were — not surprisingly — SEO, email, and PPC.

For affecting brand perceptions (which I would argue is an investment in future conversions), PPC was essentially dead last at the bottom of the list, only beating out the vague “other” category.

What’s interesting is that SEO and email marketing — the other top 3 tactics for conversions — are also in the top 3 for brand perceptions as well. So SEO and email are pulling double duty, whereas PPC goes AWOL in the branding mission.

That’s a crime!

Putting aside the branding opportunity within paid search ads themselves — which are not insignificant, as the continued domination of The Golden Triangle shows — there remains a tremendous untapped opportunity for great brand experiences on landing pages.

Take your conversion rate in PPC. Say it’s 10%. That means there’s 90% of the people who clicked on your ad (not a trivial action of intent) who got a full-frontal brand impression from your landing page — a far greater dose of branding that any banner ad could ever hope to offer.

If you didn’t leave them with a stellar brand impression, why not?

If you’re paying for clicks, but throwing away the value of 90% of them, then your PPC branding doesn’t just suck, it’s also the source of a big sucking sound from your online marketing budget.

P.S. I guarantee you that if you improve the brand experience of your landing pages, not only will it help contribute to your brand perceptions mission, it will also improve your conversion rate. That’s what post-click marketing is all about.

Comments

[Robert Brady]

First I would question if respondents were valuing the impression or the landing page experience when grading how PPC affects brand perception. I agree with the placement of 2nd to last if you judge PPC by the 130 characters of the ad (which is what I think is more likely), but if you're talking about clicks that hit the home page it should definitely be higher.

Second, you're right on that a landing page should present a very concise and positive brand image to a user. Right away a visitor should know where they are, what they can get and why they should take action.