Is your brand working against you in the search engine? When your prospects search for you by name, are you the first brand they see? If you aren’t the number one listing for your community’s brand you might just have a brandjacking problem. You wouldn’t be the first community to experience this, even marketing agencies like us experience brandjacking attempts. We know being brand jacked can be a frustrating experience, but rest assured, it’s a battle you can win. By the end of this article, you’ll know how to overcome brand jackers and reclaim your rightful place in the search engine.

What exactly is brandjacking?

Brandjacking is when a company or individual, shows up when people are looking for your brand, impersonates your brand, or targets customers of your brand.

It’s important to note that brandjacking isn’t always a deliberate attack on your brand by your competitors. Brands with names that contain common phrases or location terminology are often brandjacked unintentionally.

Where can you be brandjacked?

The most common form of brandjacking that apartment communities experience is in search engines.

Bigger brands can be brand jacked through Facebook and Instagram advertising but apartment brands are rarely if ever, a targeting option in the Facebook ad platform. The closest someone can get to brandjacking you in Facebook is to target people within a one-mile radius of your community.

How can I be brandjacked in the Google search engine?

Your brand can be overrun in the search engine organically and through advertisements.

While it is not unheard of for people to use organic search engine optimization to brandjack competitors, it isn’t as prevalent as brandjacking through paid advertisements. If your community is brandjacked organically, it’s probably the result of your brand name including a common phrase or location. It is harder for competitors to rank well for your brand name organically in the search engine because a lot of organic SEO is dependent on how relevant their landing page is to the brand name keyword they are targeting.

Intentional Brandjacking

If you are being brandjacked intentionally it’s because your competitors have bid on keyword searches in Google that include your brand name. While Google takes keyword relevancy into account when ranking ad campaigns, they also factor in how much companies bid for a given keyword. This means that if someone is spending more than you in Google ads for your brand, they can rank above you in the search engine and steal visibility away from you when prospects and residents are trying to find you online.

Unintentional Brandjacking

It is also entirely possible for other brands to target a broad match keyword that accidentally overlaps with your brand name. When someone bids in Google ads for a broad match keyword, Google presents their ad when synonyms or other variations of the key term are searched. If your brand name includes a city name or a common apartment descriptor like “luxury” or “modern”, it could also be possible that other communities are deliberately trying to bid on what they consider to be relevant terms for their community.

What can I do to overcome brandjacking?

One way you can protect your brand from brandjacking is to bid on keywords that reference your brand. These brand-specific Google ad campaigns can help you rank above competitors bidding on your brand. The good news is that your website will be better optimized for your brand keywords than your competitors on Google. It will be cheaper and easier for you to capture your brand terms than competitors because Google takes into account landing page relevance and ad relevance among other things. Your brand campaigns are more likely to rank higher and get better cost per click rates than competitors bidding for the same terms. Once the cost rises for your competitors to bid against you in the search engine, many may look elsewhere for targeting opportunities.

Brand Campaigns in Search

Regardless of brandjacking, it’s a good idea to bid on your brand name in Google. It’s the way the most interested prospects are searching for you online. On average, brand campaigns have higher click-through rates than non-brand campaigns and brand keywords have lower costs per click.

Another reason communities should bid on their brand is to capture those people who are searching for their brand after seeing a brand awareness campaign. If you are running display or social ads, people are likely to come back to Google to look for your community after seeing the ad. Ensuring you show up at the top of the search engine is a good way to make sure you don’t lose the leads you generate from other marketing efforts.

Conclusion

Companies and communities are both intentionally and unintentionally targeting brands on Google. Communities that bid on their own brand can rank for the top position in Google for less than it costs the competitors trying to brandjack them. By bidding on their own brand keywords in Google, communities can deter brand jackers and ensure they are the only beneficiary of their branding efforts.

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If you own or operate a location-based business, you’ve likely dreamed of the day you can attribute marketing dollars to real-life foot traffic. Google started working on making this dream a reality in 2014, but the feature only rolled out to a limited group of high traffic companies. Over the last few months, Google started making a larger feature roll out to small businesses and enterprises. Advertisers can now track the campaigns, keywords, and devices that lead to store visits in Google’s ad platform. Up until this point, advertisers have been able to attribute ad campaign success in Google Ads through website traffic, website events, online purchases, and phone calls. While these metrics do a great job of measuring the intent of searchers to visit a location, store visits allow businesses to see how this online intent actually translates to foot traffic.

Who can take advantage of Google’s store visits?

• Companies that have nonsensitive location-based businesses (Ex: Apartments, Car Dealerships, Hotels)
• Companies that have a Google Business Profile set up for each location and 90% of their location links verified
• Companies using location extensions in Google Ads
• Companies that received thousands of ad clicks and impressions
• Companies that have enough foot traffic and pass user privacy thresholds

How does Google track store visits?

Google uses a variety of signals to arrive at the store visits data they report in your Google ads account. Google maps data, store locations, wi-fi signal strength in stores, GPS location signals, Google queries, visit behavior, and a sample of 1 million users who opted into allowing Google to track their location history are all used to determine and validate this metric. Google surveyed over 5 million people to confirm they actually visited a store and used this feedback to update their algorithms. Google is very confident about this metric, they’ve claimed that this data point is “99 percent accurate”. (Wordstream)

How should companies interpret this data?

Advertisers can segment store visit data in Google ads by new and returning visitors. If your company is focused on generating new customers, you can analyze your search campaign data to get a better idea of how new store visitors are finding your business and which ad copy they engage with. Companies looking to generate more repeat business from existing customers are able to evaluate which campaigns lead to returning customer visits and optimize for this customer segment.

Marketers can also use store visit data to build better customer journey models. Advertisers can segment store visits by the number of days that elapsed between a prospect clicking on an ad and visiting the company’s location using the “days to conversion” metric. This data becomes even more interesting when you break it down at the campaign level. Consider comparing days to conversion by brand and non-brand campaigns to get an idea of how long it takes customers who uncovered your business through a non-brand search to visit you as opposed to someone who knew to search your company by brand.

While we know more searching than ever is happening on mobile phones, some high-value purchases or searches that take place in an office setting (B2B), may be more likely to take place on a desktop as opposed to a mobile device. Using store visit device breakdowns, companies can find out which devices high converting prospects use to search for their product or service.

How can companies use this data to generate more store traffic?

This new metric opens the doors for location-based businesses to better attribute and optimize their Google ads campaigns. Everything from ad copy, keyword targeting, location targeting, and device targeting can be evaluated using this metric. Once advertisers use this information to gain a better understanding of what drives store visits they can reallocate budgets and bidding to hone in on the campaigns that generate the most traffic.

Interested in seeing how this metric has impacted other businesses? Check out these case studies from Google.

AdWords Store Visits Data Proves Search Marketing Investment Drives In-Store Visits

AdWords Store Visits Helps PetSmart Measure How Google Search Advertising Affects In-Store Traffic

Office Depot Attracts On-the-Go Shoppers With Local Inventory Ads

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