• by Paul Cook , September 14, 2011

Taxes are not fun. In fact, most of us will go to great lengths to pay no more than our legally required share. We will use software to help us find deductions and/or turn to skilled accountants to minimize our taxes.

Yet when it comes to digital media, many brands are paying the equivalent of a navigation tax every time they buy their own brand name as a keyword. And most likely, they are paying this tax without even knowing it!

What is a search navigation tax?

Every day, hundreds of brands are paying Google and Bing large sums of money for the privilege of owning their own brand name in search results. The logic is that brands should make it easy for their prospects and customers to find their brand Web sites, even if that brand's organic search results are really strong. This action is often justified by the fact that searching consumers will click on these links.

The problem here is that many of these clicking consumers would have gone to your Web page anyway and instead just took the lazy way out. We've all done it, right? You type in a brand name instead of a URL and then click on the highest link on the page. Of course, if that paid link wasn't there, we would have just scrolled down the page until we found the organic listing we were searching for in the first place! And we would have done so at no additional cost to the brand.

Unfortunately, the search engines have persuaded marketers that buying their own brand name is of real value, when instead it operates like a tax -- a search navigation tax. And because most marketers don't have an effective conversion or accounting system in place for these particular PPC buys, the cycle continues unabated. The search engines will certainly not tell you to stop spending the money in this manner!

How can you avoid paying the search navigation tax?

The simplest way to stop paying this tax would be to stop including your own brand or product name in your search buys. This approach, however, is a bit like piloting a plane in the dark without radar -- sure you might get to your destination, but you won't learn much along the way -- and there's always a chance you'll land in the wrong place.

Another option would be to put more emphasis on your natural search rankings to ensure that your brand or product name is appearing near the top of more keyword searches, and put less emphasis on paid search.

There are whole treatises on how to improve your SEO efforts, so I'm not going to go into much detail on that here. The important thing to remember is that whatever approach you take, you need to have a full view of the customer journey, so you can determine whether paid search or natural search is having a greater impact when it comes to conversion attribution.

I recently evaluated the efforts of one of our retail brand clients and discovered that by a pretty large margin, they were putting far too much value on paid search -- and thus overpaying for important keywords -- and not enough on natural search.

You can glean this type of real-time performance attribution through your marketing agency, which should be able to track how all your campaigns are impacting specific customer purchases, or through an installed tag management system. The point is that it's simply not enough to look at the "last click" anymore.

With the right information at your fingertips, you can actually follow the real path to conversion, identifying not just the last click, but also all the other relevant clicks along the way. With multi-touch reporting you can see the navigation tax in action and put a stop to it.

You can also learn how your various campaigns -- like organic search, PPC, display and other ad buys, as well as affiliate referrals -- came into contact with a particular site visitor, whether that visitor was incremental and all the other places that visitor came into contact with the brand.

Once you have all this data, you can begin to see the trends on how people first found you and where their incremental activity is coming from. In the process, you will be able to separate the real value from the "tax." Many of our own clients are seeing that brand search terms are a tax, driving traffic that would have come anyway, perpetuating a system that only a taxman could love.

What can you do with a navigation tax refund?

Given the opportunity, marketers can take the money they save and plow it back into digital media, including search, re-targeting, affiliate and real-time bidding activities -- using the funds to drive more consumers to their Web sites. We've found that many of our clients that were spending 5% to 15% of their search budgets on brand name PPC are now shifting these dollars to other activities. As a result, they are increasing site traffic and ultimately increasing sales -- it's like manna from heaven. Sure beats paying taxes!