A branded search strategy should be set by marginal CPC, not average CPC or impression share. This matters because impression share only shows auction share, not whether the next click is worth what you paid. Marketers who chase impression share as a goal often price gouge themselves, bidding past where traffic still pays off. This video explains how to find the balance between skipping branded search and overspending on it.
Why Branded Search Strategy Should Be Built Around Marginal CPC, Not Impression Share
Branded search strategy should be built around marginal CPC, not impression share, because impression share tells you how much of the auction you’re winning without ever telling you whether that traffic is still worth what you’re paying for it. In this video, John Wallace, CEO of LiftLab, lays out the two camps marketers usually fall into: those who refuse to bid on their own brand name at all, since customers who already know the brand are just navigating, and those who feel they have to dominate the auction so competitors can’t capture that traffic instead.
Wallace argues the right answer sits in the middle, and getting there means stepping away from impression share as a decision-making metric. Impression share can’t tell you how much revenue you’re generating or weigh that against what you’re spending to get it, which is why brands obsessed with maximizing it often end up price gouging themselves. The better question is what you’d actually be willing to pay for one more click, tracked as marginal CPC rather than average CPC, so you can find the spend level that fits your specific brand instead of defaulting to either extreme.
In this video, you’ll learn:
Why obsessing over impression share can harm your profitability
How to move beyond average cost-per-click (CPC) metrics
The importance of evaluating the marginal cost of acquiring an additional click
How to find a balanced investment strategy that is specific to your unique brand needs
TIME STAMPFull Video Transcript: Branded Search Strategy Explained
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John Wallace explains why branded search strategy should be built around marginal CPC instead of impression share.
[0:00 – 0:33] Two Perspectives on Branded Search
One of the age old questions in marketing, ever since Google started the auction, is how much should I spend on my own branded search term. It is almost the third rail of marketing, and unfortunately, marketers kind of think about this problem in two camps. The first: I would never buy my own branded search term. Why would I pay for that? I have already trained people to type to spell my brand correctly, and it is really just navigation. I see the merits of that argument. The second is: I need to buy all this traffic I can. I cannot afford to let this traffic go to my competitors, so they tend to want to really dominate the auction.
[0:33 – 1:05] The Problem with Impression Share
As you can imagine, the answer is going to be somewhere in the middle. I have seen a lot of brands get a little bit obsessed with this, what I call a secondary metric, and what they start to look at is impression share. While impression share is a real metric and it is really nice that Google can share that data with you, that is not an economic decision. To make a decision about impression share, it does not tell you how much money you are going to make, and it does not weight the cost of what you are spending in order to get that traffic. We have found that people that are obsessive over impression share are quite often price gouging themselves.
[1:05 – 1:33] Finding the Right Strategy
So what we like to think about is: what would I be willing to spend for another click, and get comfortable with that decision, and then go measure it in the wild and find out what you are actually spending. The answer here is quite often to not be looking at the average CPC, but looking at the marginal CPC. Once you have a habit of doing that, you will have a lot better information on not ending up in the first camp, not ending up in the second camp, but ending up where you should belong for your brand.
Key Lessons: Optimizing Branded Search Budget With Marginal CPC
Avoid vanity metrics: Impression share is often a misleading metric because it does not account for the actual revenue generated or the cost-efficiency of the traffic acquired.
Shift your focus: Instead of focusing on average CPC, marketers should analyze the marginal CPC to determine if the next click is actually worth the investment for their specific brand.
Find your middle ground: Successful branded search strategies avoid the extremes of either abandoning branded search entirely or overspending to dominate the auction, favoring a data-driven approach instead.
