11 strategies for multi-brand Google Ads advertisers

An economic and a branding issue

As a multi-brand CMO, you certainly invest in Google Ads (like 96% of brands).

You’re also probably aware that your brands may be competing in the same market segment, therefore coveting the same keywords and ad audiences. In this respect, some problems can arise.

1. First, you risk competing directly with your own brands, which can lead to revenue cannibalization and a waste of your advertising budget.
2. In addition, when different brands use the same keywords or target the same advertising audience, they may be in direct competition with other advertisers who want to position themselves on the same terms and audiences. This can result in a higher cost per click (CPC) and lower return on investment (ROI) for your ad campaigns.
3. The lack of a clear strategy to manage brand competition can lead to consumer confusion and lower awareness of your different products.

A “fratricidal competition” that marketers would like to solve

It is for the aforementioned reasons that some marketing directors consider it important to “orchestrate” the paid search of different brands, to better manage what they call a fratricidal competition.

Their dream? That each brand posesses its own territories of keywords and advertising audiences, aligned with its unique positioning…

But there’s also the issue of performance. Indeed, it is crucial to identify the best targeting for each brand (keyword or audience), in order to adjust its SEA strategy accordingly to maximize ROI and minimize costs, overall.

You can run an experiment to quantify the economic impact of your fratricidal competition.

• Pick two of your brands with their own Google Ads account.
• With one brand, bid on an [exact] keyword with a Target Impression share strategy for one week. Note the CPC you’re paying.
• Then, bid on the same [exact] keyword with the other brand, applying the same target impression share strategy for another week.
• At the end of the experiment, measure by how much the CPC on the first brand rose: this is the incremental cost you’re paying when two of your brands are competing against each other.

The right SEA approach starts with the advertiser’s business objectives

What to do in this situation of fratricidal competition?

As it is often the case, there is no single right answer. Everything will depend on the business and marketing objectives of the advertiser. Indeed, the strategy to execute in Google Ads accounts varies according to what the marketing department wants to do:

• Maximize ROI: Find the optimal balance of profitability, even if it means not growing the brands in volume and managing them as a portfolio.
• Accentuate differentiation: The goal is to polarize distinct customer segments to create space for all brands that operate in the same industry.
• Encourage innovation:  Consider that having several brands in the market is an opportunity to learn faster than the competitors and gain a competitive advantage over them.
• Find new growth territories: To dilute fratricidal competition, one can also “increase the pie” with new keywords and new audiences, so that each brand doesn’t need to step on another to grow.
• Increase global market share: To gain economies of scale, some groups use their brands to dominate a market segment and increase their market share on all sales channels.

Of course, there are times when advertisers may want to pursue more than one of these objectives at a time. However, it is important to realize that in order to achieve each of these objectives individually, certain key success factors are more important than others.

Each business objective requires a different mastery of the key success factors

Each objective pursued by the advertiser requires adjusting the cursor on different dimensions. In a multi-brand context on Google Ads, there are five key success factors to consider.

1. Financial resources: This is the available Google Ads budget that the company has for its various brands. Some objectives will inevitably burn more cash than others.
2. Cannibalization prevention: If the advertiser’s objectives are synonymous with more profitability and efficiency, this dimension is crucial. It is about the efforts the advertiser is willing to make to voluntarily avoid cannibalization between its different brands, and their overlap in the SEA universe.
3. Ability to differentiate brands: In some cases, brands within the same group have few ways to differentiate themselves. In other cases, their differentiating positioning allows them to naturally attract different customers. Some strategies involve the ability to position brands without overlap.
4. Ability to coordinate execution: Playing an advertising symphony, orchestrating several Google Ads accounts of several brands is not an easy task. It sometimes requires a high level of operational & organizational coordination. It may be challenging to reach certain objectives if each brand is managed by different teams/agencies which never talk to each other.

Governance style: It’s the North Star that must guide the marketing strategy implemented on Google Ads, and it changes according to the business objectives you want to give to the SEA strategy of the group.

Here is a mapping of the importance of each key success factor, according to the advertiser’s objectives:

It can be complicated to pursue multiple objectives at the same time. If an advertiser wanted to maximize its market share while improving profitability, it would automatically have to be excellent on all dimensions, and have a “paranoid” governance that would constantly challenge brands on their growth AND profitability.

Looking at this mapping, we also notice that there are two situations that seem easier from an operational point of view:

• When the objective is to foster innovation, because it consists mainly in letting brands compete voluntarily to push them to learn faster, and then to reinject this knowledge internally to make the competition even more “spicy.”
• When the goal is to maximize market share at all costs, because the most important success factor is the size of the advertising budget, and the ability to coordinate operations accordingly. If you have a lot of money and an existing organization that communicates well, then it’s all sorted.

Reflect on your own situation to help you define the right objectives for your organization, as a whole:

• What is the #1 metric that measures success in your company?
• Think like your CEO: which goal should you pursue to take advantage of your multiple brands in order to build a sustainable competitive advantage in search engine advertising?
• Analyze your brand portfolio: are your brands well differentiated by design or are they voluntarily positioned to increase your market share in a specific market segment?
• Does your acquisition strategy rely on a decentralized pull of talents and partners, or do you centralize operational skills to simplify execution?

Now, let’s look at the Google Ads strategies for each of these business objectives.

1 / RATIONAL SHARING: Share keywords between brands, based on their historical performance

“Data beats opinion” is the saying. If you manage paid search in a multi-brand context and you want to improve the ROI of your total budget, a first technique is simply to distribute the keywords to each brand according to their performance.

In concrete terms, you let the brand that historically records the best CPA or ROAS on a given keyword bid. You ask all the others to remove it from their campaigns to avoid competition (and drive up costs), and thus minimize overlap.

While simple to understand and implement, the approach has many drawbacks (e.g., the type of keyword match used by brands). It is also a strategy that risks greatly constraining the growth potential of each brand, and limiting conversion volumes for the group.

ADVANTAGES

• You avoid cannibalization as much as possible and thus limit competition between your brands.
• The approach of cutting anything that doesn’t perform as expected allows you to improve the main KPI “for sure,” in a mechanical way.
• From a group perspective, the advertising budget is streamlined to the maximum and each brand targets the audiences that are the most relevant to them, which inevitably increases conversion rates and advertising ROI.
• The reasoning, based entirely on historical performance, is simple to understand and to accept.
• Setting up your strategy is simple: for each brand, there are “allowed” and “prohibited” keywords.

DISADVANTAGES

• It is necessary to “invest” in a learning period where your brands will all bid on the target keywords to know which one performs best (establishing a “benchmark”), which necessarily has a cost.
• Expanding coverage/scaling an account can be more complicated, as it is defined upfront that certain semantic territories are “reserved” for other brands in the group, although they could also bring additional customers.
• In addition, this strategy could lead to a dilution of brand awareness and confusion for consumers, who might have difficulty distinguishing between the different offerings of the group. Indeed, if each brand avoids bidding on broad and popular keywords, this could limit the group’s overall visibility in the market.
• This strategy could also lead to imbalances in the advertising budgets allocated to each brand. If a brand is allocated less popular keywords, it could have a lower advertising budget and limited reach compared to other brands in the group.
• Performance can change over time, so once you “freeze” keyword portfolios between brands, you won’t know in the future if a brand could improve its performance in a given territory (e.g., after a site redesign, or new content strategy).
• Depending on the keyword match types used in Google Ads by each brand, it remains possible that overlaps continue to exist. It is then necessary to have a heavier implementation (negative keywords between accounts) for the strategy to work well.

2 / ALL TOGETHER: Align keywords & bids between all brands, and try to influence, together, the bids

Google Ads combines an advertiser’s bid and Quality Score to calculate what it calls “AdRank.” AdRank determines the position of advertisers on the search results page, and influences the CPC price an advertiser will pay if their ad is clicked.

Multi-brand groups can take advantage of this mechanism in Google Ads to control their spending by letting Google’s algorithm display the most relevant brands for a given query, and then try to lower CPCs in their market.

In some sectors, we notice that 10%-20% of keywords represent 70%-80% of conversions. In this context, it’s difficult to assign keywords to each brand. This is where the “All together” strategy makes sense.

The method consists in taking advantage of the number of brands available to try to “influence” the bids. By ensuring that all brands target the same keyword, the company increases its “weight” in the auction. It can then try to influence the market by moving its bids downwards in a synchronized way.

Here’s how the method works:

1. A portfolio of keywords is defined at the company level, and each brand bids on them.
2. To avoid competing with each other and triggering an inflationary trend, it is important that the bids are the same between all brands, for all keywords.
3. Once the ads have been activated, we let the AdRank define for each auction the most relevant brand that will be displayed at the top, and we measure the overlap rate between the brands.
4. As soon as we observe a decent overlap rate between the different brands, it means that the company starts to “own” the auction on the given keyword.
5. A synchronized drop in bids is then carried out (e.g. -15% on CPCs). Suddenly, the system understands that all the brands have lowered their CPCs, which has the effect of lowering the level of AdRank required to be positioned in the auction, and therefore allows for a decrease of these targeted keywords CPCs.

ADVANTAGES

• This strategy can help keep overall advertising costs down for the group by reducing internal competition and leveraging the Google Ads auction mechanism.
• If all the brands lower their bids simultaneously, the CPC can drop as well, saving money on the overall Google Ads budget.
• The approach synergizes all the brands of the group, which gives a competitive advantage to influence the Google Ads auction at the market level (other competitors, who do not own various brands, will not be able to reproduce such a tactic).

DISADVANTAGES

• The strategy can result in lower impressions and clicks volume, as brands’ ads may “suddenly” be less visible if bids are lowered in a synchronized manner.
• The approach limits brands’ flexibility in terms of adjusting their bids, without really taking into account their own goals and performance.
• The execution requires a very high degree of coordination, which makes the management of Google Ads campaigns less agile, more complex, and more prone to human error.
• Finally, brands may be tempted to ignore this rule and overbid on keywords, which could lead to internal competition and an increase in the Google Ads CPC.

3 / THE FOOTBALL TEAM: Divide visibility by funnel stage, if the brands’ sites have complementary business models/content

It sometimes happens within multi-brand companies which divisions each has a different strategy on its site, although it addresses a quasi-similar audience:

• For example, a brand distributed through retailers could have a “brand site” on which nothing can be purchased;
• Another brand could have a more developed content strategy (e.g., a blog) in relation to certain market issues;
• Another brand could be e-commerce enabled, to allow consumers to buy directly online;
• Etc.

If this is the case, you can leverage synergies in paid search by orchestrating your multi-brand visibility by funnel stage. Your ambition is to capitalize on the complementarities of each brand to make your audience aware of their problem, educate them through value-added content, and then convert them.

In this approach, your brand portfolio operates like a soccer team: each one has a precise role to play to allow the whole firm to get more sales in the end.

ADVANTAGES

• By giving a specific role to each brand, you limit cannibalization and direct competition between them.
• This strategy also allows you to better coordinate the efforts of each brand in the group, by clarifying what is expected of them, and the preferred acquisition tactics & channels to develop. This way, each brand can focus on its specific role in the buying cycle, complementing the actions of other brands to generate a greater overall impact.
• You turn the apparent lack of homogeneity of your brands into a strength, and capitalize on what each one does best.
• You create synergies by using the assets of different brands (e.g., ad kits, content, audience lists) to articulate a mechanic that moves the consumer through the buying process.

DISADVANTAGES

• Although easy to grasp theoretically, the strategy can be difficult to implement, knowing that the consumer buying process is not linear in reality.
• The approach requires effective coordination and communication between the different brands in the group, and strong governance to define their respective roles and maximize the overall impact for the company. If a brand needs to change its role in the buying cycle to respond to a specific opportunity or threat, it would require a complete overhaul of the firm’s SEA strategy.
• As with the previous strategy, the approach could lead to imbalances in the advertising budgets allocated to each brand, depending on the relevance of its role in the buying cycle.
• Finally, such an orchestration could create confusion in the eyes of the consumer, who could have difficulty in identifying the different brands as parts of the same whole (especially if the advertising messages are not coherent or if the brands do not have a cohesive visual identity or a clearly defined positioning).

Are you interested in maximizing your overall ROI on Google Ads? To define which strategy is the right fit for you:

• Audit your historical Google Ads data for all your bands to find if performances vary significantly between brands for the same keywords and intent.
• Assess the processes you currently have in place with your agencies: are they agile enough to ease coordination between all your brands? What improvements would you envision ?
• Make an inventory of all your content, across all your brands: do you see potential synergies ?
• What are your current budgeting processes? Your incentives for each brand? Are they optimal enough to implement a more synergistic SEA strategy ?

4 / YOUR CHOICE: Appear at the same time, on the same keywords, but with different USPs

As marketers know, the same market can be broken down into different customer segments. A segment is a homogeneous subset of a population (customers, prospects, consumers) on which it is possible to practice differentiated marketing actions in terms of offer or communication.

Some companies position their brands in such a way that covers a maximum number of existing segments in a given market (e.g. ,L’Oréal in the beauty industry). In such a situation, another Google Ads strategy is to allow different brands to bid on the same keywords if they are relevant, but with ads that clearly differentiate their individual positioning.

Thus, when a user makes a search, he “self-qualifies” alone by clicking on the brand (thus the positioning) that best resonates with him.

If the brands have relatively close marketing positioning, it can jeopardize the success of this approach. In this case, you can consider implementing a variation of this strategy: have each brand offer an exclusive promotion, which can only be found at that brand. This is something that can be communicated directly in the ad, and can influence the consumer’s decision towards one brand or another.

ADVANTAGES

• There are no bans, and brands are free to bid on any keywords they wish, which could result in increased traffic and customers to their respective websites.
• By differentiating themselves in their ads, each brand can highlight its unique positioning, assets and distinctive values, and thus effectively cover each market segment targeted by the group.
• With this strategy, the multi-brand company does not prejudge consumers’ intentions: it simply exposes the different choices it can offer through its brands, and lets the consumer choose the brand that will best satisfy his or her needs.
• Since Google Ads makes advertisers pay for clicks and not impressions, other brands that were also displayed in the same auction but were not clicked will not have to pay anything from their advertising budget. This is “free” visibility offered on Google.

DISADVANTAGES

• If the ads of the different brands are not sufficiently clear and distinctive, this could lead to confusion among consumers and damage the credibility and reputation of the whole company.
• With this approach, it is clearly stated that the different brands are competing for a share of the same market (direct competition), rather than seeking to develop the market as a whole.
• It is possible that this “organized competition” will eventually turn into a bidding war, which will increase the advertising costs for the whole firm.
• It is impossible to guarantee that all brands will appear at the same time and in the desired order. Competitors will inevitably come and insert themselves in the final ranking. Also, the multi-brand company can’t be sure that this strategy will generate the expected multi-choice perception in the eyes of the searchers.

5 / A GEO ZONE FOR EVERYONE: Define “catchment areas” for each brand

Some businesses have a local dimension to them. This can be due to the presence of sales outlets, distributors, or sales agents who share the market in geographically limited sales areas.

The geographical dimension can also be relevant to the positioning of the brands (e.g., one brand is aimed at the urban upper class, while another brand may distribute its products in supermarkets, to a wider public in the suburbs)

In these cases, we can decide to replicate the geographical area of each brand on Google Ads, taking care to avoid any overlap and therefore any cannibalization.

ADVANTAGES

• This strategy allows each brand to target specific geographic areas where their presence is stronger, and thus avoid direct competition with the other brands.
• This allows for better control of advertising costs, by only running ads in geographic areas where the brand has a strong presence or demand.
• Finally, this strategy can contribute to strengthening the image of each brand, by making it more present and visible in its territory.

DISADVANTAGES

• This strategy is not growth-oriented; it inherently limits the brands’ opportunities by preventing them from reaching new customers outside their predefined geographic area.
• This approach can reduce the impact of the group’s advertising campaigns by limiting their reach to specific geographic areas.
• Finally, from an execution perspective, geography can complicate the structure, management and reporting of advertising campaigns.

Are you interested in accentuating your brands’ differentiation on Google Ads? To define which strategy is the right fit for you: 

• Run online advertising tests to measure the impact of using various claims: is there a different “sweet spot” for each brand, or are consumers all responding better to very few powerful claims?
• Assess the processes you currently have in place with your agencies: are they agile enough to ease coordination between all your brands? What improvements would you envision?
• Make an inventory of all your content, across all your brands: do you see potential synergies?
• What are your current budgeting processes? And your incentives for each brand? Are they optimal enough to implement a more synergistic SEA strategy?

6 / SURVIVOR MODE: Consider each brand as a competitor to accelerate the company’s learning curve

In some industries, being the fastest is what really counts. If you don’t run faster than the competition, they will catch up and crush you in their path.

With the rules being such, some firms prefer to admit that all their brands are, in a way, competing with each other, and therefore have to drive their Google Ads visibility accordingly.

It’s “survival mode” on Google Ads: only the best will stay. To survive and win, brands will often even have different SEA agencies. Thus, the group is “connected” to multiple skills centers that compete with each other to see who will win on Google Ads.

All the best practices accumulated must allow the company, as a whole, to take a lead over its rivals. To do this, knowledge is first captured by a central hub of excellence, then ideally spread internally to other brands, to spice up the competition and create emulation!

ADVANTAGES

• The main benefit of this strategy is that it can encourage healthy competition between brands, which are incentivized to be more creative and innovative.
• By pushing brands to come up with better and more relevant strategies and work with a variety of talents, identifying the right SEA practices becomes easier and faster.
• In addition, this strategy can also allow the company to better understand consumer preferences and thus better meet their needs; it can even improve the firm’s overall strategy or lead to the development of new brands to satisfy unmet needs.
• There are also “political” benefits to this healthy competition; if a brand manages to win and achieve outstanding results, it can improve its visibility and reputation within the company.

DISADVANTAGES

• This strategy often leads to a cannibalization of the group’s brands, with internal competition that may undermine the overall effectiveness of the paid search strategy.
• The fragmentation of Google Ads specialists and the fierce competition between brands could lead to additional costs for the group.
• In order to stay ahead, brands may be reluctant to share best practices with each other, or even seek to disclose them, which can create an unhealthy corporate culture.
• If the competition between brands is not fair, in the long run, there can be a phenomenon of mimicry; one only follows what the best brand in the company does, without trying to surpass it.

7 / STICK TO YOUR CHANNEL: Divide Google Ads networks to avoid head-on competition

When analyzing the portfolio of a multi-brand company, it is common to find that not all brands are at the same stage of maturity. They don’t necessarily all have the same business models. Sometimes, they don’t even offer exactly the same type of solutions!

In this case, CMOs may decide to explore other advertising channels available in Google Ads, such as YouTube or the Google display network. By playing with multiple channels, the group can reach a wider audience, and thus avoid brands stepping on each other’s toes.

The multi-channel approach can provide more precise targeting opportunities (better tailored to each brand) and greater flexibility in terms of ad format, allowing the company’s brands to differentiate themselves further.

ADVANTAGES

• By using different channels, the company reduces its dependence on the Google search network alone, which can be prone to cannibalization.
• By exploring other advertising channels, the group can reach a different (and potentially larger) audience that would not be reached by traditional text ads.
• Reaching diverse audiences can increase the chances of conversion. For example, one brand may use YouTube ads to reach a younger, hipper audience, while another brand may use the display network to reach an older, professional audience.
• Each ad network can offer different but very powerful targeting options that could be used to reach a very specific audience, unique to each brand.

DISADVANTAGES

• Campaign management can quickly become complicated: each advertising channel has its own specificities (e.g., different creative ads) and its own learning curve, which could complicate the overall management of the advertising strategy.
• Some advertising channels, such as Youtube and the display network, can be expensive in terms of acquisition cost and ROAS, which could increase costs and decrease the group’s advertising efficiency.
• Finally, there is also a real risk of poor performance; if the advertising strategy is not well thought out and executed on each network, the group may not obtain the expected results.
• The complexity of executing this strategy can make coordination between the different brands more difficult.
• Finally, the use of multiple advertising channels can make the measurement of overall advertising effectiveness more complex, which can make it difficult to make decisions regarding the allocation of the advertising budget.

8 / MONOGAMY: The keywords can overlap, but each brand must specifically target a predefined audience beforehand

Some groups create specific brands for each customer group in their market. Take the example of L’Oréal:

• The “mainstream” brands seek to appeal to the masses of consumers (e.g., L’Oréal Paris, Maybelline).
• “Luxury” brands are more upmarket (Lancôme, YSL Beauté).
• The “professional” brands seek to satisfy the needs of hairdressers (L’Oréal Professionnel, Redken, Matrix).
• Finally, the “care” brands aim to seduce consumers for whom the active ingredients of the product are at the center of their decision to purchase it (La Roche Posay, Sanoflore).

In such cases, a Google Ads strategy that avoids cannibalization is to define in advance for each brand the precise audience typologies that each one can target.

Let’s again take the example of L’Oréal. The group could decide who will be displayed when a user searches for “moisturizer”:

• If the user is classified by Google in the affinity segment “bargain hunter,” then the L’Oréal Paris ad will be displayed.
• If the user is classified by Google in the affinity segment “luxury shopper,” then it is Lancôme that will display its ad.
• If the Internet user is classified by Google in the in-market segment “Baby food,” then this will remain the preserve of La Roche Posay.

Thus, by considering the keyword and audience dimensions in their targeting, all brands will be able to bid on the same keywords, without ever competing with each other.

ADVANTAGES

• This strategy maximizes the chances of conversion, as each brand is able to target its specific audience and deliver ads that truly meet the unique needs & expectations of that target.
• The approach also avoids cannibalization between brands, as each one focuses on a specific market segment, and it becomes unlikely to compete directly on the same keywords.
• This strategy also allows a better use of advertising budgets, as each brand keeps the freedom to adjust its bid on each keyword, according to its own margins and performance, in order to maximize its return on investment.

DISADVANTAGES

• This strategy can be difficult to implement because it lacks flexibility; each brand is forced to align its entire strategy with the affinity/in-market segments as defined by Google.
• From an ad messaging perspective, this can also be complex: to leverage the strategy to its fullest, it is crucial that each brand create specific ads for each audience segment it targets.
• With such a strategy, if one of the brands fails to reach its business goal, the company will not be able to know if it is due to poor campaign management, or if it is the audience segment chosen upfront that is actually not suitable for the brand.
• Finally, since consumers can belong to several audiences, there may be some cannibalization. In addition, this can lead to confusion for consumers who may see different ads for the same search based on their profile and browsing behavior, which can be perceived as inconsistent or even confusing.

9 / FIRST CONTACT PRIORITY: Brands can only target strangers and those who have already visited their website

In movies, we sometimes find two protagonists who are in love with the same person. This love collision can lead to the characters exclaiming themselves “I approached him/her first!”. Well, this scenario could very well inspire your multi-brand strategy on Google Ads.

Indeed, it is possible to establish a simple rule: as soon as a user has visited one of the brand sites, he becomes the “preserve” of the brand. This is a way to avoid cannibalization and to incentivize the brands towards new customer recruitment.

This means creating audience lists of the visitors of each site, and excluding them from the campaigns of all other brands. Thus, each brand must make the effort to “recruit” a new user to its site. Then once it has driven the visitor to its domain, the other brands will no longer display ads, since the remarketing lists will be mutually excluded from the campaigns.

ADVANTAGES

• This strategy avoids competition for already qualified audiences, which can prevent cannibalization, especially for an audience of warm leads who are already considering one of the brands.
• Each brand has the freedom to target new prospects without the risk of cannibalizing the existing customer base of other brands in the group.
• Brands can all use the same keywords to attract new prospects, which can be simpler and more time and cost effective than having to find new keywords for each brand.
• Brands can benefit from the data collected by other brands in the company to better target their campaigns and focus their efforts on growing the business as a whole.
• By excluding the audience that has already visited another brand’s site, brands can avoid paying for unnecessary and potentially annoying ads for these users.

DISADVANTAGES

• Brands may have difficulty agreeing on the mutual exclusion of their qualified audiences, which can create tension within the company (e.g., should we exclude visits over 30, 90, 180, 540 days? Should we include or exclude users who have bounced or stayed on a site for less than 30 seconds?)
• This strategy can limit remarketing and conversion opportunities for brands, who will only be able to target strangers who are not familiar with any of the brands.
• Brands may not be able to take advantage of certain consumer insights, such as synergies that may exist between multiple brands, as some data will not be shared due to the mutual exclusion of qualified audiences.
• Brands risk losing visibility into brand searches that would potentially be performed by Internet users in the consideration phase, but who have already visited another brand’s site.
• With this approach, the group must be very careful about protecting the personal data of Internet users, in accordance with the RGPD, and obtain the explicit consent of Internet users to share this personal data between the group’s brands.

Are you interested in trying to expand the SEA pie? To define which strategy is the right fit for you: 

• Think about your 5 years business goal: how intense should be your efforts to recruit new customers/rejuvenate your customer database? 
• Make an inventory of all your advertising content, across all your brands: do you see any complementary assets? How strong is the overlap between your brands?
• Beyond SEA, what are the historical advertising channels that your brands are leveraging, individually?
• Dive into your Google Ads data, and run an experiment: on which precise audience segments are your brands currently getting their best results? How strong is the overlap between your brands?
• Work with your Chief Privacy Officer: how easy is it for your company to organize data sharing between your brands?

10 / PLAY DOMINATION: Maximize the overlap between brands to capture a higher share of clicks

There are industries where “winning” means having the largest market share. This is especially true when there are significant economies of scale, and a strong pooling of resources between brands.

In such contexts, some groups will want to dominate the SERPs at all costs and leave no opportunity for competitors. The assumption here is that there is a direct relationship between click share and market share: the one who captures the most traffic on its sites is the one who will sell the most.

To make this strategy concrete, the group can define a list of top keywords in its market and ask each brand to bid independently on these terms. The goal is to have, for a given query, a maximum of the group’s brands displayed simultaneously.

Success is measured by:

• the overall impression share of the company: with this strategy, the multi-brand company aims to appear almost 100% of the time for a given keyword, through one brand or another.
• the overlap rate between brands: we want to create for the user a “false alternative” as often as possible between the different brands of the company, for a given query.

ADVANTAGES

• This strategy provides greater visibility for the company on strategic keywords, which can attract more traffic and potential customers.
• The approach provides better protection against competitors who may try to capture the same keywords.
• Such a maneuver allows the firm to dominate search results and impose its image on the market (which can have a positive impact on brand awareness and brand salience).

DISADVANTAGES

• The cost of this strategy can be very high, as each brand in the group must bid on the same keywords, which can lead to increased competition between them.
• To be successful (thus ensuring maximum visibility and overlap), bids should not be limited. However, bidding on top keywords can become more expensive in the long run.
• The quality of the user experience may be altered, as users may see multiple ads from the same company, for the same keywords, which may seem intrusive and negatively impacts the relevance of search results.
• Such a strategy could be perceived as anti-competitive by other players in the market, which could have a negative impact on the firm’s brand image.
• Individual brands may have different marketing objectives, which can make it difficult to coordinate across the group and impact the effectiveness of each entity’s advertising budgets.

11 / THE RECOMMENDATION GAME: Boosting cross-sell between brands

This strategy is about encouraging brands to cooperate with each other and share their data. In this configuration, brands are not competitors, but rather partners, suppliers of second party data.

The principle of this approach is based on a brand strategy designed to be complementary, in order to serve different needs of the same customer. For example, imagine a ready-to-wear company with a sportswear brand, another one with chic clothes, and a third one with urban clothes. The synergies between the brands are obvious: consumers could dress only with the brands of the company to fulfill all their clothing needs.

In such a situation, cannibalization on Google Ads is less strong by nature, as each brand can leverage keyword variations to better target its specific audience (although this is less and less true with behaviors observed on broad match or “phrase” types). However, there is still an untapped opportunity: cross-selling between brands.

To take advantage of this opportunity, the group can ask brands to create specific campaigns that would target only the customers of other brands. The objective is to maximize the conversion overlap between brands: if a person has bought brand 1, we want to maximize the percentage of buyers who will then become customers of brand 2 and 3.

However, beware of the RGPD rules: When obtaining the user’s consent, you will have to specify that the cookie can be used by other brands of the group for advertising purposes.

ADVANTAGES

• Cross-selling can increase overall group sales by encouraging existing customers to purchase products from other group brands that they may not have previously considered.
• This strategy also maximizes customer loyalty and lifetime value for the company by actively encouraging customers to buy from multiple group brands and by providing a consistent and harmonious brand experience.
• Beyond the efforts to recruit new customers, advertising costs can be reduced because remarketing campaigns can be targeted to existing customers who have already expressed interest in the group’s products.

DISADVANTAGES

• Customers may feel harassed or overwhelmed by repeated advertisements for the group’s brands, which can lead to a loss of loyalty and satisfaction.
• Customers may simply not be interested in other group brands and may even perceive this as a hard sell.
• This strategy may not be effective if the products offered by the other brands in the group do not match the needs or preferences of existing customers.
• From a branding perspective, customers may perceive the group’s brands as interchangeable entities without distinction or unique value.
• The strategy may also present risks to customer privacy if customer data from one brand is shared with other brands in the group without the explicit consent of those customers.
• In addition, sharing data between different brands in the group can lead to confusion for customers about how their data is used and shared, which can damage customer trust and loyalty.
• Finally, if data is shared with brands that are not based in the European Union, this can raise compliance issues with the GDPR, which prohibits the transfer of personal data to third countries that do not ensure an adequate level of protection for personal data.

Multi-brand groups face unique challenges on Google Ads. The cannibalization that can occur between their different entities can have negative repercussions on the company’s advertising costs. But it is also a great opportunity to maximize ROI, accentuate differentiation, foster innovation, find new avenues of growth or maximize market share. However, the key success factors to be mastered can vary from one ambition to another.

In conclusion, one question can be asked: what is the best multi-brand strategy on Google Ads? Which of these 11 options is the best? It depends…

It is indeed impossible to recommend a specific strategy without knowing all the details of the company, its objectives, its resources, etc. Each strategy we have discussed may work differently depending on the context and specifics of the company in question. Therefore, it is essential to conduct a thorough analysis before committing to one path or another.