Case Study: Branded Search Incrementality Test

Ever since I started my career in paid media, marketers have been debating the actual effectiveness of running branded search campaigns.

Yes, when you look at performance in Google Ads these are often the most efficient campaigns. However, the question is always, “Wouldn’t these people click on the organic listing anyway? Why would we pay for this traffic?”

It’s a fair question, so I wanted to test this for a client.

The test set up was fairly simple. We aligned on pausing the branded search campaign for the entire month of January, and comparing performance to January from the prior year to account for seasonality. When preparing for this test, I built out some basic benchmarks based on data from January 2024:

• Branded organic search CTR

  • This was 45% for 2024

• Total percentage of branded searches that end up on the site across organic and paid

  • For 2024 this was 77%

• Contacts attributed to organic search / branded search impressions

  • This helps me to understand the impact to the business in terms of efficiency and not volume

• Deals attributed to organic search / branded search impressions

  • This helps me to understand the impact to the business in terms of efficiency and not volume

• Won deals attributed to organic search / branded search impressions

  • This helps me to understand the impact to the business in terms of efficiency and not volume

Using organic deal volume compared to branded search volume was important to understand how pausing branded paid search impacts the business compared to just the impact on traffic. I understand that some of these organic search contacts/deals/customers could have come from nonbrand searches, but given that a large portion of organic search traffic for this client is branded, it was a fair measure to use for this test. While it’s rare to set up the analytically perfect test, the findings here were fairly clear and allowed us to make a confident decision.

After January 2025 concluded we found that organic search branded CTR improved from 45% to 65%. While this didn’t cover 100% of the traffic from paid, the contacts / branded impressions and deals / branded impressions metrics improved by 190% and 457% respectively.

It’s too early to make a call on won deals yet given this business’s average sales cycle.

This was an indication that pausing the paid branded search campaign allowed organic search to pick up on more high quality traffic.

In this particular case, we’re keeping the branded search campaign paused indefinitely. With that said, this is far from a rule of thumb. I recommend running this test for each individual brand to account for nuances like competitor bidding.

Have questions, considerations, or critiques? I’d love to hear them! If you’re reading this via email, just hit respond. Otherwise, you can find me on LinkedIn.