I recently had the chance to speak to a small business owner who was having an issue with their paid search spending. They had a very limited campaign on Google AdWords, and the main impetus behind it was that one of their competitors had started bidding on their brand name. This competitor had started stealing some of their traffic and, in response, this business owner wisely started a campaign centered around their brand. With a high quality score and little competition, the clicks weren't all that expensive and their traffic returned to their previous levels for a reasonable price. Over time, however, a strange thing started happening: the budget limits were getting reached earlier and earlier and the overall traffic numbers began to drop. This was a bigger problem.
When many small companies start a paid search campaign, they tend to do less homework than they should and they end up paying for it, literally. Whether it's leaving Google's default settings on for content network ads or failing to select the hours and days they want their ads to run, it's what happens when people venture into paid search for the first time. In this instance, however, it was something much less obvious. Smartly, after seeing the dip in traffic, this business owner started looking for changing trends in their traffic sources. While their paid search was relatively steady (and set to a limited budget), the organic traffic showed a steady decrease. Upon further examination, it became apparent that the culprit were brand names—in particular, the company's name. Further cracking into the analytics showed that an increasing number of paid search clicks were going to returning visitors. So what was happening? The ad title and copy being used looked VERY similar to their organic listing and many return visitors to the site were mistakenly clicking on the ad and chewing up their ad budget.
The remedy here was to create ad copy that qualified new visitors. In the example above, Coca Cola bids on their own name, but they're very obviously pushing their rewards program rather than a general informational search about the product or company (this would get expensive very quickly if they did this wrong!). For our small business owner, changing from an ad title that reads "Company X Insurance Plans In Springfield" to something like "Discounts For New Enrollees - Company X Insurance" would help clarify that the paid ad was where people shopping for insurance should click as opposed to someone simply looking for the company. Also, creating a specific landing page for these new visitors rather than sending them to the familiar home page will help teach returning visitors not to click on the paid ad. If you're seeing similar issues with your paid search, experiment with ways to qualify your visitors with ad copy and targeted landing pages, and you can help avoid overspending for your branded terms in paid search.