If you have already read the Marketing Attribution blog, then hello 👋 and welcome! If you haven’t, then pop over there and read that first and then come back.
Someone is scrolling Instagram. They see your advert. They don’t click. They keep scrolling.
Later that evening they think, “What was that company I just saw?” So, they Google your brand. They click your Google ad. They visit your website. They buy.
Now look at that journey through the eyes of the different platforms.
And you ask yourself, who is right?
Well, they all are… in a way.
What’s really important to point out here though, is that the person described in this scenario wasn’t necessarily already brand aware. They may have become brand aware because of the original Facebook or Instagram exposure. And the customer has effectively just remarketed to themselves.
The advertising created enough interest for them to go looking for the company somewhere else.
And this is one of the reasons I get nervous when I hear, “They’re searching for our brand, so they already knew about us.”
Do they?
Or did something cause them to search?
No.
Not every person who searches for your brand has been influenced by your advertising.
Some people will already know you, some will be existing customers, some will have been recommended to you. Some will have found you through PR, word of mouth, organic search or offline activity. And some would have searched for you whether or not they saw your advert.
That means we shouldn’t make the opposite mistake and assume that every branded search conversion was caused by paid media. It wasn’t.
This is precisely why attribution is difficult.
We are trying to measure something that happens inside a person’s head using data generated by the things they do online. The data can tell us what happened but it’s much harder for it to tell us why it happened.
We’ve often heard the argument, “Why are we paying Google for people searching for our own brand? They already know who we are!”
It’s a reasonable question and sometimes the answer might be that you don’t need to pay for that traffic. In Google Ads, a Brand Search campaign is also the only type of campaign you ought to be using max CPC bidding on too, to throttle back how much you are paying for each of those brand clicks so you can control the costs.
However, the assumption underneath the question deserves challenging – a branded search doesn’t automatically mean pre-existing brand awareness.
A person can search for your brand because they’ve known you for ten years or they can search for your brand because they saw your advert ten minutes ago.
Those two people can produce an almost identical Google Ads conversion and the platform doesn’t necessarily know what caused the search.
The biggest issue I see isn’t actually the technology, it’s the mental model where businesses often expect advertising to behave like a vending machine.
But marketing doesn’t generally work like that.
An advert might create awareness and that awareness might create curiosity. Curiosity then might create a search and the search might then create a website visit. The website visit and exploring how you present your brand and your products might create trust – and they might trust you enough or have their curiosity piqued enough to sign up for your email newsletter. An email might bring the person back and a review might remove the final objection.
And then something completely different gets recorded as the conversion source.
The conversion is real. The other marketing activity was real too.
This is why I like thinking about paid search as part of a loop, rather than a standalone channel.
Imagine this:
Paid social creates exposure → Exposure creates awareness → Awareness creates search
↓
Search captures demand → The website turns interest into consideration → Conversion creates data
↓
Data improves the next campaign → Better campaigns create better exposure
And the loop starts again.
Google isn’t necessarily competing with Facebook and Facebook isn’t necessarily competing with SEO. Email isn’t competing with Google either and organic content isn’t competing with paid search.
They can all be contributing different things to the same customer journey.
Sometimes one channel creates demand while another captures it and then a third channel converts it. And sometimes the same person moves between all of them before they buy.
So instead of asking ‘Which channel generated the sale?’, ask, ‘What role did each channel play in getting this customer to the point of buying?’
We are often hired in to provide a function that our clients can’t cover off with their in-house staff. So to some of our clients we are the social media consultancy, whilst to others we are the SEO agency, for others still we are the Google Ads company.
When you have disparately focussed teams working in a silo, it’s easy to point at the social media team and declare that they aren’t pulling in the sales. Or you might pitch the Google Ads high conversions rates and declare the SEO team to be doing a bad job. But you need to be looking at how all these marketing teams pull together in the same direction and orchestrate them all to work together.
The objective is to understand how the different parts of your marketing system work together to create customers.
So the last-click matters, but the last click isn’t the whole story. And if that last-click sale was on a Brand term knowing that this was the reason for the sale matters, but it doesn’t prove brand awareness.
In short – yes.
Running a small campaign (never more than 10% of your total budget) and keeping Max CPC constraints on pure brand terms (no product names, no synonyms, no non-brand terms should also be in that campaign) is a way to capture the people who have already been exposed to your brand and reel them in.
The rest of your account’s structure should be engineered around feed hygiene if you are ecommerce, and prospecting non-brand terms, synonymous phrasing and what the data is telling you about customer behaviour through the phrases they use to find your products.
If you would like us to audit your Google Ads and see where you could get improved performance, get in touch and we’ll happily look over your account for you.
If you’d like to talk to us about this news piece, or you need help with tracking, analytics, website management, Meta Ads or any other aspect of digital marketing, then email us on info@destination-digital.co.uk or give us a call on 01629 810199 for a chat.
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