PPC driven year-over-year branded sales are down – so the first natural recourse is to find someone to blame. Logical deduction would have it that it is the fault of whoever is managing the PPC campaign, because surely, if the PPC campaign was driving strong branded sales last year, well then, what has changed this year to lower those sales figures? Surely, it should just be identified and fixed.

This is, unfortunately, not quite that simple. It is difficult to exert a great measure of control over branded sales online – certainly, a branded PPC campaign can facilitate branded sales but it cannot be managed in the way that the competitive landscape is managed within non-branded terms.

Whether people are actually searching under a branded term is a function of the strength of the brand, word-of-mouth and offline brand building marketing efforts designed to drive branded online traffic. The branded PPC campaign may have been built, but certainly it does not mean they will come and it is not the role of the branded terms online to make them come.

Not PPC?! Who’s the Culprit?

There could be a number of contributing factors to lower PPC branded sales. You should explore as deeply as you can to determine the most logical answer to your particular business scenario.

-       Cannibalism: If you have affiliates, this would be the first place to take a careful dive and investigate whether affiliate sales have gone up while branded sales are down. As much as affiliates are commissioned to in the long term increase your business profits, affiliates are known to employ a number of less favourable tactics to increase their own sales and resultant commissions.

Are affiliates advertising under your brand name, mimicking your ad copy and even the look & feel of your site? If they are sneaky and advertising directly against you or outside of the hours on which you advertise under the brand name – this could well increase affiliate sales at the expense of your own.

It could also be another factor – if organic site sales are up on branded terms, then that’s a good thing – you’re saving money on PPC costs and getting more sales organically.

-       Offline Marketing is Down: If you’re not doing the same types of things that you were doing last year in other marketing channels this will have a very real affect on your branded PPC sales. Even if you cut those catalogue mail-outs by a few 1000 or cut a radio advertising segment, this could significantly impact your PPC sales. Fact is, the act of searching online is an intent driven activity. If people are not aware of your brand and not thinking about it – then, they’re not searching for it either.

-       Worldwide Economic Recession: If Average Order Value (AOV) has dropped, year-over-year, it may just be a sign of the times that your customers are making fewer orders at lower values that previously. There’s not much you can do about that.

-       Competitors Outdoing You: If a close competitor has ramped up their offline marketing efforts or is offering a significant promotion – this could very well be pulling away sales from your brand. You need to monitor competitor activity in order to be to retaliate accordingly.

Most of the factors that could contribute to lower PPC branded sales have very little to do with the actual PPC campaign itself. This is why you cannot manage a PPC campaign in a silo, you need to be aware of not only micro environmental factors but also the greater macro economy.