A marketer tested cutting paid search bids on their own brand name, Canva, and found organic results still drove traffic. Michael Kaminsky says many CEOs worry about this, but outcomes vary by business, so testing is essential before you stop spending on branded terms.
So the biggest win for us was an early experiment that we ran. Our CEO actually said one day, why am I spending so much money on advertising for my own brand name on Google Search? Why am I bidding on the word Canva so much? Why am I paying so much for that? Is it necessary? The first experiment that we ran was to literally answer that question posed by a CEO. And we said, how can we solve this problem and generate advocacy and buy-in for how we think about this? We ran an experiment where we tested different bidding reductions for Canva branded terms and found that we could just turn it off. We showed that if you eliminate branded SEM for Canva terms, the organic search result carries the, the users through to the website and you don't need to pay for Canva branded terms. So we turned it off. That has been sort of like the cornerstone thing for us, which was like answer a big business problem, answer a big business question, get the buy-in and get the trust. That will help you get advocates for your way of thinking about things. So before we had this kind of framework of experimentation and modeling, we had no way of answering this question. And this just gave the business a load of confidence that this approach would head us in the right direction.
I love that story because it resonates with me. I've gone through exactly that of like branded search has the big question mark. You run the experiment, the results are striking, and it sort of gets the whole organization aligned. I've talked to a lot of other people who have had exactly, literally exactly the same channel, Same question from the CEO. CEOs hate having to bid on their own brand term. I can tell you this from experience. And so this is like a really, it's a great crystallizing moment. And so I would say like, you know, if you're on this journey as well and you're listening to this, like that is an awesome experiment to run because the results are interesting. And it's not always the case that the result is branded search does nothing. I've worked with businesses where branded search is highly incremental, or at least turning it off does cause their business to drop. And so you do need to run the experiment to prove it. It is incremental in a number of very important cases. This type of experiment can be so valuable for getting an organization all of a sudden excited about incrementality in really positive ways. I love that it was also true for y'all.
The Continuous Testing Loop That Separates Great Marketing Teams From Average Ones
