Dave Naffziger's Blog

I love good, well-thought analysis and strongly dislike half-assed, poorly drawn conclusions. I’ve found way too many examples of ‘analysis’ done where the authors didn’t do meaningful analysis, and therefore drew meaningless conclusions. Johnathan Mendez has a great analysis of whether it makes sense to buy PPC ads on your branded terms (for example, buying the search term “Amazon” if you’re Amazon.com).

His analysis indentifies two counter-intuitive conclusions about buying your branded keywords (for ecommerce sites):

• PPC ads on your brand have no impact on traffic. You get the same traffic regardless if you buy PPC ads or not. So much for the shelf-space analogy.
• The PPC ads raise conversion. Huh? This surprised me, but his analysis appears to be solid. He believes its a result of different searching modes. I’d also agree that makes the most sense.

His full blog post is very interesting, and worth a careful read.