Paid search addiction is killing your brand health

If you loved watching Mad Men on TV, you’ll recall how the characters seemed to smoke like chimneys and drink like fish. The golden age of advertising as it became known.

Today, though, marketing has evolved significantly from the days of Mad Men. Instead of boozy lunches and celebratory smokes, now we have lunchtime running clubs, healthy diets, Dry January and yoga clubs.

But while marketing might have swapped cigars and bourbon for flip-flops and callisthenics, there are plenty of addictions floating around. Namely, one giant addiction, paid search, and it’s time we got to grips with it because it’s killing brands.

How much does a click cost?

In their annual report, which examined paid search data from March 2023 to March 2024, Wordstream stated that the cost per click of paid search had increased for 86% of industries.

They also found that cost per lead increased for 19 out of 23 industries, with an average increase of about 25%. This is a little lower than last year’s 27% increase, which came after “record inflation and an unstable economy”.

To save any of your brains while eating your quinoa, this is a whopping 52% increase in cost per lead over 2 years.

Are brands wasting millions on content?And before you run for the director’s bottle of whisky, which you know he keeps locked in his drawer, I’m assuming you’ve realised that we aren’t even looking at the data from last year.

Yes, the CFO will be all over the marketing department, especially when she reads about Google’s advertising revenue being up by 12% year-on-year.

Of course, every sector is different, and there are some winners and losers in this data, but the point remains the same. Your addiction to search costs is going up, probably while you’re being squeezed by inflation.

No wonder marketing spending is in the gutter. But it doesn’t have to be like this.

The Long and the Yawn of It

Les Binet and Peter Field released their classic book The Long and the Short of It over a decade ago at this point.

In this report, they were as clear as day. Make sure you build a brand. But repeating this message is getting tiring, as the point they were trying to make still isn’t hitting home for marketers.

Like the muscle-bound gym goer who skips leg day, we skipped brand building. The result being a sea of top-heavy brands that are not only addicted to but reliant on paid search.

At the same time, they face being squeezed by Google costs, competitor bidding, and inflationary issues with their operating costs. There is an inevitable doom cycle going on here.

Brands become reliant on paid search, so they grow nicely until they reach what has become known as the performance plateau, or the point of diminishing returns.

However, to grow their brand beyond this plateau, they must take some of the business profit and build a brand marketing budget.

AI search is going to change marketing… are you prepared?This situation creates an awkward silence in the boardroom as the marketing manager goes to management like Oliver, saying, “More, sir, please… can I have some more?”

And so, any marketing manager will then be faced with the unenviable task of trying to explain how ROI is an efficiency metric and how brand marketing helps to improve market share.

Of course, as we know, these conversations tend not to go well and, in my experience, marketers who have tried this approach often fail to get through.

Especially as the bean counters look on like Ebenezer Scrooge with their plans to deplete any ‘surplus’ marketing activity that doesn’t directly impact their spreadsheets in a positive way.

Marketing has become a bit like Groundhog Day. Trapped in a vicious cycle. But there may be a large megaphone we can bring into the boardroom.

Share of search is a megaphone for marketers

Share of search is gaining some maturity now, and I feel it is starting to break into the marketing ecosphere.

I split share of search into two sectors.

● Share of organic brand search (which is how it is traditionally used)

● Share of organic buyer intent search.

While both are important metrics to address, they mean different things to different people. Share of search, then, looks at your share of branded search compared with the competition. While share of organic buyer intent search, looks at the amount of free traffic there is in the market for high purchase intent search terms. And your share of that.

The brands who rank high for both of these things win business at no incremental media spend. Both of these share of search metrics serve almost as a magic mirror: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the brand winning the most business of all?”

Not you.

Armed with this share of search data – and it most likely looks grim – what will you do about it? This is the megaphone of share of search. It tells the business cheaply and effectively that things aren’t right. And once you get the board onside, you have to take action.

RIP your business or RIP some profit

If you’re dependent on paid search traffic, you don’t need a degree in nuclear fusion to understand where paid search is heading. Costs are only going to increase, and you should start sweating.

Here’s a big statement, then, that everyone can get their heads around.

Why are we paying Google for leads?

You’ll almost always come back to two things.

● You don’t rank organically for purchase intent keywords

● Not enough people search for you.

And both of these are areas you need to fix. Yes, you’ll have to invest in brand building and SEO. But the alternative is to be a slave to Google.

Let 2025 be when the year you think strategically about reducing your paid search addiction. It might be uncomfortable. But tackling it head-on is the only solution.