Future of Search Engine Marketing

Performance Max, Broad match & RSA

The more brands I work with, the more it becomes clearer. All successful Search Engine Marketing(SEM) campaigns are unanimously driven by Brand Keywords.

If any brand claims that their SEM campaign works really well, this is what is happening in their account. Most probably.

• Close to 25% of their budget spent on brand keywords

• More than 50% of the conversions coming from brand keywords

Essentially, Brand keywords' performance subsidizes the non-performance of the other keywords and glorifies the overall campaign performance.

This is not new. It has been happening for more than a decade, and many brands experienced it. Yet only a few brands have worked on it with notable success.

One such brand was eBay. Of course, today, the brand is small. However, without any exception, they were the pioneers in advanced search engine marketing a decade earlier.

In the first quarter of 2012, eBay stopped bidding on their brand keyword "eBay" from all search engines- Google, MSN & Bing.

For them, it was a tough decision to make because it was their highest ROI Keyword. There was no PMax then, so they knew the ROI from that keyword.

For every $1 spent on that keyword, they got $12.23 in return. It was a great ROI by any means. And they were getting $245.6Mn in revenue from bidding on this keyword alone.

With much resistance, they took the experiment live in mid-March 2012. Their result was the best-case scenario they had built while starting the campaign.

As below.

This was a published case study.

Today, if any few brands try to do this, it might happen only to a certain extent.

Google earns billions of dollars from Search Engine Marketing every year and controls close to one-third of the global digital marketing budget. So it won't allow this to happen easily today.

How do they do it?

Companies bid for their brand keywords in 3 scenarios.

1. When they are not ranking 1st for their brand keywords.

This is a rare scenario, but it happens.

Take the example of “Digitanomy”. Since the newsletter is more known than the site, it ranks first. In this case, if I want to divert my brand search traffic to the main website, I bid on my keywords.

2. They rank first for their brand keyword, but other brands are bidding for them too.

In that case, if they stop bidding, they will miss out on some traffic.

As someone else will show up in the first position, they will lose a small portion of the traffic.

3. You are ranking first for your brand keyword, and other brands are not bidding for your keywords.

This scenario happens more often then not. Knowingly or unknowingly.

eBay example above falls under the third scenario. That's the reason eBay was able to extract the complete value in the organic traffic when they stopped paid marketing on their Brand Keyword.

On the flip side, if you stop bidding on your brand keywords today, you will not be able to extract all the value in your organic traffic.

Because other brands will be bidding on those keywords for sure.

Basically, it is scenario 2. And over the years, Google made sure it is always scenario 2.

Google's ultimate aim over the last 5-6 years is to ensure scenario 2 is dominant across all the brand keywords.

They have deployed powerful tools and campaign types to achieve it over the last few years. They also make sure that those tools are adopted fully by all the advertisers.

Initially through account managers and later forcefully.

Let's understand them one by one.

Responsive Search Ads (RSA)

RSA was introduced and pushed as a great alternative to expanded text ads five years back.

What does RSA do to your keyword targeting?

It essentially expands your keyword targeting without your active input.

You want to target only a particular set of keywords, but the engine thinks that if it expands the keyword targeting, it can get more conversions, it will do it.

How?

It uses the text suggestion we give in the RSA list as the keyword and broaden the targeting. When it was launched, they made sure that all the accounts were using them with the help of account managers.

Then they made it a best practice.

Eventually, last year, in June 2022, RSA completely replaced text ads.

While RSA is a new tool introduced and pushed, Broad Match is a trojan horse.

Broad match

“Today's exact match was what the phrase was five years back;

Phrase match was what the broad match was five years back;

And Broad match is like God because it can do anything.”

Today in Search engine marketing, Broad Match is a weapon of mass destruction. You can’t control anything when you use it. You have to keep negating the search terms if you want to restrict the campaign.

One of the most common auto recommendation you receive in Google ads which is also pushed by account managers is moving campaign to broad match.

With the history of RSA, when something like this happens we can easily guess what will happen in the future.

Performance Max

Performance Max campaign was marketed as powerful, AI driven campaign. But what it does is it takes all control from marketers and makes everyone to spend in Ads.

It doesn’t provide data to the marketers to understand what is working and what is not working in their campaign.

It targets your brand keywords initially and start targeting your competitor keywords as you scale it.

While it is sold as the high convenience campaign type, underneath, it made of a system where no brand can survive without bidding on their brand keywords.

So what does future hold for Search Engine Marketing?

With the current state of Search engine marketing, we can say three things will happen in the near future. Not necessarily in any perticular order.

Reducing controls

• Option to choose match types will go away. Probably there will be one or two match type in the next few years. Close variant & Broad are my predictions.

• New feature in the search campaigns will be availabe only for Google prefered match types. It has already started. It will become a common practice in the future.

Reducing information

• Search terms level data for the search campaign will go down. We are already getting only 60% of the search term data. This is go down even further.

Reducing Option

• Keyword-level bidding will be gone soon too

• As an ultimatum, PMax will become the only campaign of choice if you want to do a search campaign

The underlying idea is if everything is done by the machine, all campaigns will produce average results. They don’t have to deal with outliers.

There won’t be a need for SEM experts. Hence no one will ask questions against the establishment.