Fellow member of the list, Mohamed Tefridj (name shared with permission), asked:
“Last week, my brand CPC increased by 200%. How to prevent CPC spike of brand campaigns without losing too much visibility?”
This is a great question that often comes up in the PPC community.
Here’s my take.
Let’s start with the assumption that you have a brand campaign targeting your brand keyword(s). The second assumption is that you have your brand keywords as both (1) EXACT and (2) PHRASE/BROAD match keywords.
1. Average CPCs for exact match keywords can easily be controlled via a Manual CPC bid strategy or a Target Impression Share strategy with a bid limit.
Note: It’s relatively easy to get a high impression share for your exact match brand keywords (even with low CPC bids) because of low competition.
Exceptions are generic brands that also appear in the dictionary (e.g., Jaguar, Patagonia), or brands that Google loves to match to non-brand phrase match keywords (thanks to the latest implementation of its phrase match algorithm).
2. Average CPCs for broad and phrase match variations of your brand are harder to control and will often show lower scores for impression share.
This is because broad and phrase match variations of your brand keywords are being matched to long-tail searches that have a lot of competition.
For example, let’s say you are Pioneer and you’re selling DJ controllers. Google matches the user query ‘pioneer dj controller’ to your brand phrase match keyword “pioneer,” BUT ALSO to your competitors’ non-brand phrase keyword “dj controller.” There could then be a lot of competitors driving up your CPCs.
So, how can you control the CPCs in your brand campaigns?
This is what I recommend: using different bid strategies with different bidding (limits) for EXACT and PHRASE/BROAD versions of your BRAND keywords.
The easiest way to do the above is to have two separate BRAND campaigns: one for the EXACT match and another for PHRASE/BROAD.
– Nils