When major advertisers in the home services industry provide paid media reporting at the end of every month, they provide a CPL that is comprised of all of the leads in your total ad spend. Those leads include product keywords, service keywords, and most importantly, your branded keywords.

Although those three advertising buckets play important roles in driving traffic and converting leads, those keywords are not equal in value when it comes to evaluating your cost per lead. What might look like an incredibly low acquisition cost at the end of the month could actually be skewed by the inexpensive and incredibly high-converting branded keywords.

Here’s Why Branded Keywords Can Be Misleading When It Comes to Your CPL Reporting:

Branded keywords are incredibly important, and to remove them from the equation like they don’t matter is the wrong approach when it comes to evaluating your cost per lead. However, evaluating them at the surface level is also not beneficial for your business. Here’s why: a consumer didn’t hear about Remodeling Company XYZ and decide to google their name. Instead, a consumer will search product and service keywords 2-3 times before ever entering in a branded keyword search.

In order to understand what products and services are driving bottom line revenue, you need to evaluate your paid search advertising in individual buckets as well as a lump sum. How can you do that if everything is constantly lumped together and there’s no transparency in the ad conversation?

How Spectrum Approaches Paid Search Differently

Spectrum takes a holistic approach when comprising your paid media ad strategy. That means we evaluate your return on specific keywords, and how an overall advertising campaign impacts your bottom line. It’s important to understand how all of the individual buckets within paid search advertising interact with all your digital marketing sources. Your overall marketing system is broken into smaller components and from there, analyzed to develop a big-picture, overarching strategy.

We understand where a lead starts their search, where they convert, and what fuels individual success and overall effectiveness. We know where you need to invest dollars within a paid search equation to reap the largest output from your campaigns. By evaluating even the smallest components of an advertising campaign, we can understand what approach works for your campaigns, allowing us to develop a paid search strategy that delivers consistent growth for your business.

If your marketing team does not understand which specific paid media campaigns are delivering your company value, something is wrong.

For more info on the critical components of paid search, download our ebook below.