Generally speaking, majority of internet marketing budgets are spent using a method called Performance Marketing. What’s that?!

Performance marketing, often also called direct response marketing, is the type of marketing in which you are aiming at achieving an immediate desired action (AKA “conversion”) from your site’s visitor. At a later stage, once you calculate projected revenues for each type of conversion, you can attribute marketing effort to a business impact. The business impact will usually be measured in terms of ROI or profit and that’s probably the biggest advantage of performance marketing. Examples for direct response marketing can be SEM, and other types of PPC. Buying media under CPA model will also fall under the definition of direct response marketing.

While most of the budget are invested in performance marketing, some goes to brand marketing. Brand marketing is aiming at increased brand exposure. While most of the internet marketing budgets spent on direct response, brand marketing is where most of the offline budgets are spent. Fluffy as it sounds, brand marketing is more difficult to measure, and considered as a long-term investment. Examples for brand marketing will be “Like” campaigns, sponsoring events, printed advertising, billboards etc.

The great benefit of performance marketing is in its measurability. While you won’t mind to invest 1% of your budget in non-measurable activity, you will expect to calculate ROI for the remaining 99%. On the other hand, building a strong brand name is probably a very wise decision in the long run making you business far more sustainable.

How much of the pie should be allocated for each category, is difficult to say, but generally speaking, brand marketing budgets should grow together with your brand. While small or medium websites should spend most of their budgets on performance marketing larger companies should be more brand minded.

What do you guys think?

Self brand bidding is to bid (and to pay) in order to appear at the sponsored ads slot when people are searching for your own brand name over a search engine.

Funny enough, it is highly recommended by Google, Bing and by any advertising agency. Are they objective? Of course NOT.

From a PPC agent point of view, brand bidding is the easiest way to demonstrate a positive ROI. From an advertiser or brand owner point of view, it fails to prove causality. Are these new customers arrived to your website because of the self brand bidding? What makes these users to search for that brand from first place? (Hint – Not the brand bidding)

If you have an established brand, brand searches might become your biggest marketing cost. If you are using attribution model of last click (If you are using Google Analytics than you are using last click attribution model) your brand bidding  campaigns tracking links will overwrite the tracking links of the campaigns made this person to search for your brand from the beginning.

But brand bidding does have few advantageous. First, if you have a big brand, your competitors will ride on your name. By self brand bidding, you are making sure that you competitors will not appear above your organic listing. In some cases, in which you have a big brand and your competition doesn’t have any real barriers (Like Groupon and Living Social) self brand bidding should be considered seriously.

Another advantage for self brand bidding is that it usually drives super high CTRS that increases quality scores and hence  helps to stabilize a  new account.

Additional consideration should be the SERPs for brand words. If you have a unique brand, your SERP for brand searches must be #1. If for whatever reason this is not the case, you might want to compensate on that with self brand bidding.

Let’s have a look what the big guys, brand savvy advertisers are doing. I searched in Google.com, surfing from an I.P situated in the US and got these results:

eBay.com are doing self brand bidding
Zappos.com are doing self brand bidding
Etsy.com are doing self brand bidding
Elance.com are doing self brand bidding
Odesk.com are doing self brand bidding
Amazon.com are not doing self brand bidding
Paypal.com are doing self brand bidding
Netflix.com are not doing self brand bidding
Hulu.com are not.

So as a wrap up, if  you are not focused on killing your competition, you probably have better places to spend your money at. A recommended middle way you might want to consider is to bid on long-tail brand keywords. If you choose this alternative, make sure to put your exact brand as exact negative keyword. Using this method will reduce the odds that you will pay for visitors who would have reach you anyhow.