Brand contextual advertising: why and how to launch

For requests that include the name of a company, an online store or courses, branded contextual advertising appears in the search results. It is characterized by a good CTR and a low price, which is associated with a high involvement of visitors, often already interested in buying, ordering a service, and low competition. A contextual advertising specialist at the Internet marketing agency Directline told why it is important to use a branded context when promoting projects.

Why you need contextual advertising for branded queries

If a user enters a query with a brand name into the search bar, then he is usually at the last stage of the sales funnel and is ready for the target action. The brand context helps to solve several important tasks – to protect yourself from competitors, strengthen the position of the brand and shift the negative in reviews and reviews.

The fight against negativity

Users leave most of the reviews on large specialized sites, which usually occupy the first positions in the search results – Otzovik, IRecommend, Yandex.Market. If they have negative reviews about the company, then using a branded contextual ad, you can shift them.

Protection from competitors

For brand queries, the ad block often contains ads from other companies with a similar product. If the user is not completely sure that he needs the brand he is looking for, he can follow the ad to a competitor.

The main advantage of brand contextual advertising is the ability to displace competitors from the first positions. Proper use of queries with the name of the company makes it more visible to the target audience. To do this, you need to select queries that contain the name of the product or a selling word, for example, “promotion” or “discount”, and the name of the brand with a note that the link leads to the official website. It is also desirable to make the most extended ad.

Another feature of such ads is the ability to block any ads showing the brand name for other companies. To do this, it is necessary to document the right to own a trademark. And competitors will no longer be able to use the brand name for their own purposes and promote projects through other people’s advertising campaigns.

Strengthening the brand position

Using brand queries in contextual advertising, you can solve the problem of difficulty in recognizing the brand name. There are several options:

• the names of some companies in the search engine are often misspelled, especially if they consist of a surname;
• the exact spelling of the brand name is considered incorrect by the search engine algorithms and offers corrections;
• the name consists of a common word that is not clearly associated with the company.

In these cases, it is necessary to clarify the scope of the company, so the brand context is used.

Tips for launching branded contextual advertising

In order for branded contextual advertising to bring good conversions and solve the main tasks, it is important to correctly launch it and use a separate ad for this. A necessary condition is a certain brand awareness of the company: users should search for it by brand query in order to increase target clicks. Also recommended:

• use clarifying expressions in queries if the company name contains a commonly used word (for example, “panther” or “chamomile” must be supplemented with the words “online store in Moscow” or “children’s clothing” and others, in accordance with the field of activity);
• track competitors and, when they appear in the context, respond to it;
• track requests that are consonant with the company name (books, movies, games, characters) and add them to the list of negative keywords for the advertising campaign;
• study competitors’ ads for use in texts or headlines of your company name.

If the first positions of the issue are already occupied by the pages of your company, then the advertising campaign cannibalizes the traffic, i.e. it takes a part of the free clicks from organic clicks from the search. When launching an advertising campaign, it is important to compare the results and costs, and analyze the top organic search results.