Google Ads Brand Keywords: Cut 80% of Brand Spend, Buy New Customers Instead

0:00Before we jump into today's all killer, no filler episode, a quick word about who makes this show possible. The D2C podcast is brought to you by Pilothouse, the performance agency behind some of the fastest growing D2C brands in the world. Creative, media, and customer journey all under one roof. Performance and brand without the trade-off. Every Friday, we hand the mic to a Pilothouse operator to break down what's actually working in their space right now. Want a team that treats your growth like their own? That's Pilothouse. Head to pilothouse.co and now on with the show. When you're going to spend a specific budget, I think it makes more sense to spend it in areas where people are not likely to find you, but are looking for the product that you're looking for.

0:41That would net you much, much more incrementality, much, much more actual revenue at the end of the day than just protecting the brand. This is a super easy way to reach people who you otherwise would not have reached. If people are like, oh, I wonder if my account has this problem, what's the quick diagnostic for people to ask their agency, look into their account to make sure that this isn't happening to them? The easy one is just to...

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2:23It's all killer, no filler. I'm Eric and I am back with Zavir. It's been too long since you've been on the podcast, resident Google expert, senior media buyer at Pilot House. And you recently wrote something pretty cool for the DTC newsletter called The Ambiguous Word Inside Wildflower Cases Paid Search Strategy. And I think it's a great anatomy of kind of where branded spend can go wrong. Was this a client audit or was this just something that you were just sort of noticing in the ecosystem? This is something I think it was a good choice to study because it's something I noticed with a lot of clients.

3:00I have like a similar issue. There's I feel like two primary issues. The impetus for this is actually Francis, our editor, who loves the brand. And I think like purchases from there often. And so like I think it just kind of came together really well. Okay, walk us through it. So this brand has a big challenge with how it's spending its branded money. Talk to me about what you uncovered with Wildflower. Yeah, I mean, big challenges is maybe harsh. Like, I think they have a really strong brand. It's just sisters, they put this brand together. They have massive followings on social. And so like, I think they have snowballed that into like a really, really strong brand.

3:36And digging into it, I do think like there's some areas where their search investment could probably benefit them better. Like, I guess there's kind of two primary concerns. The first is that the company name is Wildflower, which is a great company name, but it's also kind of like an ambiguous word, right? So if someone searches for the term Wildflower, like the chances that they're actually looking for the business, actually, there is a pretty good chance they're looking for the business. but there's also a pretty good chance that they're looking for, you know, actual flowers. They're looking for Billie Eilish or Tom Petty or like your local bakery chain that maybe has that same name.

4:18Or a 2022 movie about a girl who navigates life with two intellectually disabled parents. Yeah, exactly. All of these things. All of these things. And so it's like there is and there isn't a way from just the word wildflower to really get a sense of what the actual intent is that the person might be searching for, what it is that they're actually hoping to get your hands on. So their entire budget right now or the majority of it, according to SEMrush, is basically being spent on that one term, wildflower, occasionally on the term wildflower cases. But the majority of the budget goes to the term wildflower.

4:53And so like there's lots of different schools of thought on brand spend. But the thing is that like genuinely for the most part, someone who is searching for wildflower or wildflower cases actually looking for the brand, like they're going to find you kind of regardless. Right. They already are aware of you. The owners have a huge number of followers across social media. So when you're going to spend a specific budget, I think it makes more sense to spend it in areas where people are not likely to find you, but are looking for the product that you're looking for. So if you type in something like, I don't know, like, cool.

5:29I'm just trying one right now. Cool iPhone cases or something like that. Cool iPhone 17 case. I get and I mean, it's going to be dependent on where you physically are and what your search history is like. But I don't actually personally for me see Wildflower here across any of these searches when that right there is a super easy, clean search to get. They are super competitive in price across all of these of what I'm seeing anyways in search right here. The average price,$79,$65,$55. They sit right in that range. I think they're around$65 for an iPhone 17 case. So what I would probably do is take that brand name defense investment that they're spending right now, because it doesn't appear to be too many other people searching for their brand name and invest it in those kind of like battleground keyword spaces where you're likely to catch someone who might be looking for something that you need.

6:23And in that way, kind of add a lot more incrementality, a lot more usefulness to your investment online. That makes sense. So I just Googled wildflower. And this is something else that happened. And I think because it's such a generic, ambiguous keyword, I don't, oh, actually, no, I do see why. So wildflower cases is the number one organic result for me besides places. But then the sponsored result is all the way at the bottom, which is interesting. Whereas if I search cool iPhone cases, I get all the sponsored results at the top. I wonder if that's, does Google do that when there's a word that is a bit more ambiguous?

6:55They sort of put the organic stuff first and foremost. I don't know that I've actually seen the sponsored results go on the bottom. Yeah, so they definitely put sponsored results on the bottom. There's a lot of things that go into where that result actually places. It could be the amount that they're willing to pay for the search. I mean, one of the good things is like I'm seeing there's not a ton of competition on the brand name right now. So it's just like they're probably paying like 12 to 15 cents for the search. And so it looks really great in the results. But again, like there's not going to be a ton of incrementality.

7:27They'll show on the bottom based on how much they're paying, based on the relevance to your particular search, based on the likelihood for you to actually click on that ad. Which I don't know if this is your style of phone case. It might not be showing up so high for you. For my daughter, maybe. I think my daughter might. I'm going to show her these. And I don't really need her liking$65 phone cases, though. Wow. Fair enough. What are they made of? That's crazy. I guess that's kind of, I'm looking at the results now. I guess people are just, everything costs more, including phone cases now. I think so, yeah.

7:55And I mean, again, like looking at they're pretty competitive at$62. I mean, that seems like a lot. But for these styles of cases, some that are like a little bit more unique, a little bit more fun, and they do seem to be pretty high quality. Don't call me. I've never actually tried one. But they do seem to be pretty high quality based on the research that I've done. And so like, yeah, I think this is like market price right now. So it's an interesting one. They're sort of like it may be an embarrassment of riches kind of position where, A, they've got their traffic coming from a lot of other places.

8:25This isn't a huge brand spend. I guess$3 ,500 a month is pretty low, I guess. And like you say, they are getting the keyword probably pretty cheap because there's no other competitors. So in their results, even though there may be overspending on this term, they still probably have good metrics from it. But my question is, with$3 ,500, where would you better allocate that to get more incremental growth than they're currently getting from this strategy? Yeah, two places. I mean, search and shopping across all of those keywords that I kind of mentioned before, You know, cute phone cases. I would hit the brand name of every popular phone right now.

9:00You know, iPhone 17 case, iPhone 16 case, you know, Samsung Galaxy S23, whatever they're on now case. And I think like all across all of those keywords, you're going to capture people because, again, like those searches are I'm not catching a lot of wildflower in those searches. I am getting a lot of other brands that are selling at similar price points. You want to be able to get in the mix. And then the more specificity you can add to the search. So it's like people who are looking for a specific search, maybe a pink iPhone case. You can have them drop on the pages of just pink or for a specific phone, just drop them on the landing page for that phone.

9:38It looks like the majority of their ads actually just drop on the homepage, which makes sense when you consider that the majority of the searches are for the brand name. But yeah, adding a bit more specificity across the mix, dropping people exactly where they want to be and hitting them with something that is highly relevant is going to definitely net you more incremental revenue just from people who otherwise would not have found you. So I think landing pages is an interesting point of view. I have a note here about it being a collab first brand. How does that affect what you do in the feed versus being a catalog focused brand?

10:14I guess there are a couple of ways that you could change. You could change your approach based on that. Depending on the collabs that you're running, who you're running your collabs with, like they have a ton with like, I don't know who Seth Hudson is. Oh, I see. I'm just slushy news. A ton, a ton of popular influencers, Charlie and XCX. It's useful because you can use those terms, which add some specificity, but also have their own kind of like built-in popularity. And you can use those in search as well. So like people who are huge fans of Charlie XCX and then you can, you know, tag phone case onto that.

10:50You can try to capture any sort of like particular moments because they, again, they deal with a ton of popular influencers who are probably blowing up all the time. You can capture like moments, specific things that they've done. Like there is a ton of built in traffic in around a lot of these collabs. And I think like you should, you could use that really to your advantage as a brand. And I think like depending on, yeah, depending on the types of collabs that you're doing and then how popular those tend to be online, like I would just piggyback off all of those terms, specifically looking at shopping, because like those are the people who are going to be ready to buy.

11:24And this is also a price point where it's relatively easy to have someone pull the trigger. Like there isn't, there doesn't necessarily need to be 30, 40, 50 days of wait time. It's not like a$2 ,000 average order product where people need to, you know, people want to review, people want to price match. I think like, yeah, people see something they like, buy it. The other, one of the other point of views you had was the worth it aspect of like, are wildflower cases worth it? And right now, all of those search terms go to Reddit, where you're kind of left on the whims of the Reddit community. And there's a lot of people ripping apart that are, oh, they're not worth it.

12:01You can get it cheaper, blah, blah, blah. So what would you do with that sort of keyword string? Yeah, those are unique ones because you will always be overrun by Reddit, by the forums of the world. And depending on it, there are so many potential searches that you can capture. And I guess there's like kind of two core ways of doing it. You can you can try to rely. And I mean, for the for the near future, DSA campaigns are dynamic search ad campaigns are kind of going away. But it might be a good idea to try to capture kind of like those sort of broader terms with an automated search campaign.

12:39You can use dynamic search ads to land people on if you have like an FAQ page or if you have like, I mean, they have a really, really massive YouTube where they showcase a lot of a lot of the product and a lot of kind of like their standard social media daily lives. And I think like that's a perfect opportunity to actually show people the case. if you can drop people on a video like that, or yeah, if you can get your like FAQ page in the mix across like those sorts of Reddit posts that people tend to search for, you can try to take control of the conversation. And I do think like, maybe this is like having a really strong product, obviously it's going to be like key and just making sure that you're focusing on that.

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14:50And so like, yeah, 21, 21 ,000 followers, just about 21 ,000 subscribers, like hundreds of thousands of views per video here. Like I think connecting, I mean, again, connecting those two, like just having, having ads and you know what, they actually do a really good job of it. Just having quality, quality ads, quality product placement across kind of like their standard videos. But then you can easily dump those videos into a performance max campaign, into a demand gen campaign. And you can use videos that already have a ton of popularity that are already being monetized on YouTube to kind of just drive more visibility, more awareness in areas where, especially if you're combining that with like some retargeting campaigns, retargeting ads, you can capture people who were already like getting ready to buy, adding to cart.

15:39Those are going to be the things that actually like move the needle when it comes to your conversion rate, like at that bottom of funnel with people who are already kind of like considering. Okay. So they are going to listen to this podcast and they're going to call you and say, Zav, we need to be your client and you have 48 hours to fix this, 24 hours to fix this. We don't want to raise our budget. We still just want to spend$3 ,500 a month. How do you gate the brand spend or limit the brand spend to make sure you're not over? Because it's like 99 % of what they're spending is on these branded keywords now.

16:11So walk me through just as simple as possible, what you would do with that$3 ,500 in 24 hours. Oh, geez, I would probably cut 80 % of the brand spend, I would rededicate that to a really strong, really well segmented shopping campaign. And then I would add a layer on top of that in generic generic search campaign, just targeting those high intent keywords or people who are likely to buy that don't feature Wildflower in any way. You could also work with some of those collab keywords, Charlie XCXs of the world that they collab with, cute iPhone cases, like fun iPhone cases, pink, iPhone 17, 18, all the way through all of the like popular Android cases, anything that you have that either moves well or is popular right now.

16:56And to be honest with you, at$3 ,500 a month, you could probably just work with those core elements and create a really, really strong intentful incremental search campaign to two campaigns, maybe three at most, just running those core elements. And like that would net you much, much more incrementality, much, much more actual revenue at the end of the day than just protecting the brand. You might see the ROAS go down in that case, I imagine, because they're bidding on just their keyword and they're getting it at such a cheap price. So you actually might see your ROAS go down, but your revenue go up.

17:31Is that right? Yeah. So it's kind of funny because I feel like the in-account ROAS isn't really going to tell a story. It doesn't really tell the full story, right? Like, yeah, of course, if you're betting on brand terms, it's going to look really great. Your CPC is going to be as small as possible. Your click-through rate is going to be as high as possible. All of those kind of like core metrics that we're all trained to watch are going to look better. But at the end of the day, like when you're looking at your real world revenue. The truth is like the majority of those people who are coming through the brand campaigns who typed in wildflower cases and then found you, they were going to find you irregardless of your ad.

18:07There are situations where if you have a ton of competitors, people are bidding on your brand and they are likely to see a competitor ahead of you on your brand name, then yeah, there's definitely an argument to be made to increase some brand spend just for pure brand defense. But in this instance, it's just not really the case. Do you think, is there any, like, because I'm sure if you search wildflower cases, they're probably bidding on that as well. But like, but there's still some, you'd still leave some small budget to just show up on the super generic keyword wildflower. But like you say, like 80 % less than they're currently spending.

18:40Yeah, I would say so. And I mean, you really just do that. There's a couple, I mean, there's a few reasons to do it. One is by having that keyword in your account, you can just monitor it. You're aware of who else is bidding on it. You have an idea. If anything ever happens, if spends increase, if competition increases, you have an idea of just who's there, who's in the mix. But I think like, yeah, when it comes to actually driving revenue, when it comes to actually capturing customers that you otherwise would not have captured, growing your customer base beyond kind of like your TikTok following or the collabs that you manage.

19:17I think like this is a super easy way to reach people who you otherwise would not have reached. Just some quick fire close questions I have here. What's one metric you think agencies over report to clients? There's probably a lot. I think attributed revenue. I mean, I know that that's the basic answer, but I think like ultimately that's kind of like what it all comes back to. And it's always a struggle to understand like where every dollar came from. But I think like just it is kind of like the nature of the platforms themselves that they are going to try to maximize their reported revenue. And that's why I think like we get a little bit too caught up in looking at like, oh, platform revenue looks great.

19:59Or, you know, the ROAS through this campaign looks great. But what is it really affecting like downstream is I think like what matters more. So I guess I would say like, yeah, platform revenue and profitability. And just with the Wildflower case,$3 ,500 seems like a, I actually don't know how big they are, but it sounds like they're growing. They've got a lot of reviews, probably doing some good revenue. $3 ,500 on Google seems pretty low budget for a brand like that. Would you say that's accurate? And would you say that what you're, the methods that you're laying out and the changes that you'd make to this account would allow them to earn a lot more, like you've said, incremental revenue from the platform?

20:38And would that push, would you, like, I know agencies always want budgets to go up, but would you suggest that they, you know, it gives them more room to be more aggressive and grow more on, on the Google suite of tools? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I guess like selfishly, I would probably double that budget. And I think like there is a ton of value in doing that. I mean, again, it really depends on what they are hoping to achieve. Like, yeah. And Google for this kind of business is like an amazing opportunity, I think, to try to grow it. It's an amazing opportunity to go from zero up to something.

21:10They obviously already have a built-in following that was like super helpful to get there. But again, as I mentioned, like a lot of people, I mean, older people or like there's just a ton of people who aren't in the spaces that you are. So I think like Google ads is a great equalizer because everyone has to come here at some point or another. If people are listening to this and like, oh, I wonder if my account has this problem. What's the quick diagnostic for people to kind of look, ask their agency, look into their account to make sure that this isn't happening to them? The easy one is just to try to find out the percentage of spend going towards brand versus generic keywords.

21:47Now, it will really deeply depend on the agency that you work with or who's managing your campaign. So those might not be easy to split out. But the super quick, easy way to do it in the actual platform is, I mean, there's probably a few ways. But I would go to the search terms. I would grab all of the brand terms that you can, make a big, long list, filter to those. and just see the percentage of spend that's going to those keywords. If it's over, like, again, it will depend. It will depend on how much competition you have in the space, how much your keywords cost, what's the AOV of the item, you know.

22:25But I would probably want to keep that number roughly to, like, maybe 20%. And I even hesitate to say that number because, like, there is so many instances where that's not the number that you'd want to keep. But I'd say for most businesses who aren't seeing a huge amount of competition on their brand terms and who have a name that is relatively unique and specific to their business and their field, then yeah, 20 % is probably a fear. And when you did that, you'd want to monitor that they're getting, because right now they're spending 80 % of their budget or more on those branded key terms. And essentially what you're saying is if you were to take that down to 20 or something, they probably wouldn't see less revenue, especially if you reallocated it to better keywords.

23:11So when you do something like that, when you make big changes like that, I guess you're monitoring how much revenue they're generating. And if you're able to show them, hey, we can generate the same amount of revenue from 20 % of the spend, it's going to be a win-win. But when you do that, are you monitoring the results of kind of what happens to make sure you haven't undone something? Yeah, you definitely need to. You want to be watching constantly your auction insights reports to see kind of like where you're laying in. Are you losing ground to competitors if you have any in auction with you?

23:39One of the good things about a really strong brand campaign is that if you can really isolate the best performing brand keywords, you can maximize. I mean, ideally, you are using value-based bidding. You can maximize the value of each conversion. You will likely see your ROAS through your brand campaign go up significantly. You can do a lot with a little bit of spend on your branding because, again, CPCs are so low. Conversion rates so high. You can really push those types of campaigns to perform at their best. And then again, you can take the rest of that money and reinvest it elsewhere with people who otherwise would never have heard of you, otherwise would never have been a customer.

24:18And that's a net new person with ideally some LTV attached. Love that. So if you're listening to this podcast and you know, first of all, if you know the Wildflower people, send them this podcast. I might try to find them and send them to this. Just so I get some free cases for my daughter. And if you want Zav or anyone on the crack Google team at Pilothouse to take a look at your account and make sure that this isn't happening to you, you can just reach out at pilothouse.co and just tag Zav. I'm sure you'll be happy to take a look at their account. All right. Thanks for coming on again today, man.