Drive even more paid search savings with Brand Activator with close variants

In the ever changing world of paid search advertising, staying on top of the changes, ahead of your competition, and making the most of your advertising investments is critical. 

This blog explores Adthena’s innovative tool, Brand Activator, and how it can help advertisers like you optimize their paid search budgets while dominating your competitive landscape. We can continue to improve and iterate on Brand Activator and want to share a new feature that’s fresh out of the oven: an in-app savings report with paid and organic click optimization – all built right into the Adthena app. 

Let’s start with a short recap. 

Lone Rangers – identifying and eliminating wasted spend

I bet you’ve thought about a way to automatically turn off brand bidding on search terms when you have no competitors and already rank number one organically? Enter “Lone Rangers,” which refers to brand search terms for which you are the sole paid search bidder and hold the #1 organic position. Why pay for clicks on terms you’re already winning for free?

These Lone Ranger keywords are responsible for driving tens of thousands in wasted brand paid search spend. The good news is, they represent a no-downside opportunity to reduce wasted spending on terms where you face no competition. You can either pay for the click or pay nothing – either way, you win the click organically. 

Brand Activator comes into play by fully automating the process of pausing and restarting “Lone Ranger” keywords, allowing you to save your budget and potentially reinvest it into areas of greater growth.

Brand Activator – unlocking the full potential

Our Brand Activator tool automates the entire process of monitoring, pausing, and restarting Lone Ranger campaigns. It ensures that you don’t waste budget or lose market share and helps you stay on top of your paid search game while dominating your competitive landscape.

This automation tool works 24/7, monitoring Lone Ranger terms that you are winning organically with no rival bidders. When it detects such situations, it automatically deactivates bidding (using exact match and close variants) on these terms and adds them to your negative keyword list. If a competitor later starts bidding on these terms, the tool automatically reactivates your bidding.

The result? You save time and costs without any manual labor involved. Brand Activator routinely saves advertisers up to 20% on brand search spending, delivering an average of 24x ROI. Adthena provides you with monthly reports that track your savings and highlight areas where you can reinvest the saved budget to boost your overall Return On Ad Spend (ROAS).

Close variants – reach more of your potential customers

First a quick recap of close variants. In the Google auction, close variants allow keywords to match to searches that are similar, but not identical to your targeted keyword. It helps you connect with people who are searching for your brand or product, despite slight variations in the way they search. This reduces the need to build out exhaustive keyword lists to reach your potential customers.

Now, with Brand Activator, we will include close variants in our savings calculation to more accurately reflect the way people search. And to more accurately capture additional savings for you. You can put that savings in your pocket or allocate to strategic generic keywords helping you drive additional revenue.  

Whitelisting – enhancing efficiency with precision

Competing against your own sister domains or affiliates in paid search is counterproductive and wasteful. The new whitelisting feature within Brand Activator addresses this issue, giving you more precise control over your paid search spend.

Whitelisting lets you exempt certain “friendly” domains from being considered competitors. For example, if you own the top organic spot for a term, but your sister domain is the only competitor bidding on it, whitelisting allows you to stop bidding against them.

This feature is particularly beneficial for various industries, such as automotive brands that want to avoid bidding against their own dealerships, or pharmaceutical brands that don’t need to bid when key partners like Amazon or Walmart.com are winning for them.

In-app savings – the power of paid and organic click traffic

In our pursuit of continuous innovation, we’re excited to introduce a new feature – the ability to track paid and organic click traffic within the app. With this new capability, you gain unparalleled insights into the performance of your brand terms and campaigns.

Above: The enhanced feature provides a comprehensive view of all-time savings, daily savings from pausing Brand Activator terms and Brand Activator campaigns, all conveniently presented by your domain. 

Additionally, you now have access to get a daily glimpse of your organic click data and paid search terms. Hello search marketing nirvana. 

Who can access this data?

This feature will be accessible to all users with enabled Brand Activator savings in the app. If you are already leveraging Google Ads and Google Search Console product linking, you’re well on your way to experiencing the full benefits of this new product feature. 

Optimizing paid search advertising requires a comprehensive approach that includes identifying wasted spend with Lone Rangers, harnessing automation through Brand Activator, and implementing precise control with Whitelisting. By taking advantage of these strategies, advertisers can experience substantial savings, increased efficiency, and overall improved return on investment.

Ready to explore further?

Request a Demo of the Adthena platform and one of our search experts will be happy to guide you through it.