We had quite a chunky piece of research written up in Marketing Week last week looking at the ongoing impact of Google’s decision last year to allow competitive brand bidding.
In a nutshell, we found that aggressive brand bidding is only really happening in two sectors – travel and finance. And in the case of finance, aggregators like Money Supermarket are doing most of the competitive bidding.
Aggregators are particularly well placed to benefit from brand bidding because they often have very relevant content on their sites. And the word ‘competitive’ is a bit of a misnomer here – aggregators are an important partner for many brands, especially in the insurance sector.
Of course, it’s ironic to find a company like Direct Line, which has had a very public anti-aggregator stance, being targeted by aggregator advertising.
One thing we did spot is that companies like Tesco Insurance seem to be using affiliates to dominate the vital first page of search results. By contrast, Norwich Union seem to restrict affiliates from bidding on their brand terms – and as a result, their first page of search results features seven or eight direct competitors.
Conventional wisdom used to be that affiliates shouldn’t be allowed to bid on brand terms – but in the light of competitive brand bidding, that’s a strategy that should be reconsidered.
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