AdWords: Brand vs. Direct Response Advertising

There are two basic advertising goals that AdWords is commonly used for: branding, and direct response.

For brand advertising, you simply want to promote your brand to a target audience. You want them to be familiar with your company and what you offer. You want them to see your name, and think of your business on a regular basis.

For direct response advertising, the goal is to get new business directly. This means you would like users to see your ad, and then take an action such as calling your business, making a purchase online, or filling out a web form– thereby creating a lead that can be followed up on.

Branding

If your goal is to create brand awareness, you will want to focus on metrics such as: impressions (which are appearances of your ads), customer engagement, reach (which is the number of people reached), and frequency (which is the frequency in which the same people see your ads).

When it comes to driving impressions, Google’s Display Network is a tremendous platform for attaining huge numbers of impressions. Keep in mind that those impressions are free to the advertiser, unless someone actually clicks on the ad.

When it comes to engagement, you will want to watch metrics in both Google AdWords and Google Analytics to understand the level of engagement your ads are attaining. In AdWords, you will look at metrics like click-through-rate and conversion rate. In Analytics, you will want to look at the bounce rate, and time-on-site metrics to understand if the visitors are engaging with the content on your website.

For creating brand awareness, one of the key metrics to consider is: cost-per-impression.

Direct Response

If your goal is direct response, you’re looking to drive the highest number of conversions at the lowest possible price.

Both search and display advertising methods can be effective for direct response advertising.

When it comes to search advertising, consider the commercial intent of the keywords being targeted. For example, there’s a big difference between someone searching “roof cleaning methods” and “roof cleaning service.”

When it comes to display advertising, there is a completely different process for driving direct responses. For one thing, keep in mind that the ads do not show to people searching, the ads simply show next to content on the web. For example, the ads might appear next to a news article, on the side of the page as they are reading their Gmail, or on a particular website that relates to subject matter of an industry.

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