Useful Links
SearchSentry
paid search brand defence without compromise
Introducing SearchSentry
SearchSentry™ is the world’s first real-time brand monitoring platform designed and tailored specifically for paid search marketing campaigns. Its unwavering and relentless objective is to provide brand defence through the provision of immediate and expert knowledge of how and when your brand is being compromised, by whom, and to what avail, within the paid search channels of the major search engines.
Why is brand monitoring and brand defence important?
On May 5th Google changed the rules and began allowing your competitors to bid on your trademarked terms in the UK and Ireland, bringing both countries in line with Google’s policy in the US and Canada. From being the most reliable and cheapest traffic available to you, brand-based bidding has now been dramatically opened up to the same market forces as the rest of your paid search activity. Whilst Google believes that this will provide the consumer with greater choice, this move has introduced critical challenges to marketers and brand guardians as 83% of marketers plan to bid on rival brand terms, if they are not already doing so, according to our independent research study conducted in April 2008.
Given that your competitors can now appear in search results for your brand terms, and that they very much intend to, you will need to ensure that brand-based paid search continues to be the cheapest and most readily-converting traffic you receive, and you can do this by proactively taking control of the channel.
Now, more than ever, you need to invest in protecting your brands online, by monitoring competitor activity, mining this data, and proactively defending the brands that you’ve inherited or painstakingly created. In the offline world you would never allow a competitor to solicit your customers whilst in one of your stores, so why would you tolerate this online?
How does SearchSentry work?
The SearchSentry service has three critical steps – Monitor, Mine, and Manipulate:
Monitor
This stage represents the real-time monitoring of the major search engines, focussing on determining who is bidding on your brand terms, day or night, weekdays or weekends.
Mine
The data accumulated through the monitoring stage is mined and analysed to produce a Friend and Foe analysis:
The ‘Friend Analysis’ focuses on your affiliates or subsidiaries, determining how well they are performing in increasing your brand control over the medium, whether they are being compliant with your guidelines, and what the strengths and weaknesses might be in their current strategies.
The ‘Foe Analysis’ focuses on your competitors, determining essentially who is bidding against your brand terms, to what magnitude and what they are saying. It will also tell you whether they are complying with search engine guidelines and generally how they are seeking to compromise and capture your brand traffic through their keyword and copy selections, and their disruption of the prospective customer’s search journey.
Being both a quantitative and qualitative exercise, this mining process ensures that you have consistent data that measures your brand control on an ongoing basis versus your competitors and will give you the information you need to proactively and scientifically govern your affiliates, providing you with competitive advantage where you need it most.
Manipulate
Armed with this mined data, Greenlight’s expert consultants provide you with solid, ongoing recommendations to make tangible and measurable improvements in the defence and extension of your brand control within the medium.
How can SearchSentry help?
SearchSentry can help you by providing a level of monitoring and analysis that can only be achieved through cutting edge technology and expert analysis.
More specifically, SearchSentry can discover:
- Which of your competitors are bidding against your trade marked terms
- How often they are present and what proportion of your brand consideration they are occupying
- Whether they are playing by the rules or acting unlawfully, such as using your trademarked terms in their ads
- What they are saying in their ads to ‘win the click’ away from you, which could relate to price, quality, product/service features, or any other angle
- How well or poorly your affiliates are supporting the capture of your brand traffic
- Whether your affiliates are complying with your brand guidelines and whether your governance processes and procedures are satisfactory
- Whether you need to build your own affiliate assets and what the commercial justification might be for doing so
- How your ad copy should change in light of the activities of others, to ensure that you maintain and improve your Quality Score in this new, competitively charged environment
Performance based Link Building
Find out more
World's first real-time brand monitoring platform for Paid Search. Brand defence without compromise.
Find out more