Pissed at Dumbasses
Apr 1st, 2008 by Syzlak
I get pinged this morning by a former co-worker asking whether “[I'd] come across any blogs that say running homepage & branded terms in ppc is a good thing?”
It’s getting old people.
What’s getting old? Two things:
1) Asking around for answers instead of figuring it out for yourself (whether it be running tests or looking it up on some sort of universal encyclopedia…we need to get access to one of those)
2) Thinking that for any reason, bidding on brand name keywords would be a bad idea.
I know that I come at this industry from a different direction now that I work at an agency. The main focus of our agency has been building brands. So, whilst drinking the Kool-Aid (mmm, cyanide flavor!), I apply branding to everything I do online. Sure, some of our clients don’t have branded terms that generate much traffic, but that doesn’t mean they should be ignored. Building a presence in the SERPs is half the battle sometimes, especially for small clients.
That being said, did I learn this from running small accounts at the agency? No, I learned the value from running branded keywords and homepage ads on Best Buy - not really a small business.
So, in response to my friend, go run a test and figure it out for yourself. While I love how open this industry can be at times, and admit that I’ve learned a lot from some of the bloggers out there and the conferences, I hate how lazy it has made some of us. Shit, on average it takes 20 minutes and a week to find out how a new concept will work, and only 5 minutes to convince the boss man that it’s worth testing.
