I believe Alan (above) concurs on this “PPC for brand” subject and probably has a lot more hard data than I have…if he’s still around maybe he has a link to something he has blogged before on this…

It just seems to me there is too much intent loaded up in a Brand search like this for there to be a lot of incremental lift to PPC, along the lines of this study for the Lab Store.

I’m not sure I’m following you on this but I’ll give it a go…

Seems to me you are saying you would expect people who know the Brand to construct some form of the URL in the address bar and hit return. But what they do instead is type Brand.com in the Google search box. So what you see is all this Organic activity that looks more like URL use than Search.

I confess - I do this all the time. I find it easier, faster, and more reliable than typing / guessing URLs in the address bar.

Google as a URL appliance, if you will.

Does the above address your question? Or am I not getting it?

I’m actually today on a very interesting case (kept me up until 3 AM last night).

Here goes:

This company operates in a geographically delimited market, with a very unique product. We know from research that the client enjoys a 96% brand awareness.

Organic search actually drives a good third of the online sales! Paid accounts for close to nothing, and falling. When I look at the keyphrases, the top 20 grab 83%, with mention of the brand in all but one!

Google owns that space with MSN and Yahoo barely moving dust.

The more I look at it, the less I can call that *search*. It looks much more like *browsing* to me, as if Google was replacing the URL field of the browser.

Google is the new browser ! (OK, I say that to create an effect).

Actually, I am noticing that phenomenon more and more with companies that have strong brands, and whose domain name is really obvious, i.e. people could know right away from trying their name with .com. Still, the brand (and variations/associations with other keywords) often occupies almost all the territory of organic search terms. Quite interesting.

Any thoughts?

Agree, incredible yes. I am following up w/ Carrie for cites. Lehman Bros, I think. She didn’t provide a handout, so notes were just Alan typing fast, hence the lower quality. More to follow. Thanks for the link. :)
–Alan