The work tackled a challenge that will be familiar to many brands investing heavily in paid search: paying for clicks on branded search terms that they may have received organically anyway.
For Bensons for Beds, the opportunity was significant. By using Decision to analyse and manage more than 400 brand keyword variations in real time, we were able to identify when paid brand advertising was needed and, crucially, when it wasn’t.
The result was an estimated £400,000 in annualised savings, with that budget freed up to be reinvested into generic search terms and other digital activity with greater potential to drive incremental growth.
Using AI to make better bidding decisions
Decision is Jaywing’s proprietary AI-powered bid management technology, developed to help marketers make more efficient media investment decisions using data and machine learning.
For Bensons, Jaywing deployed Decision’s specialist Brand Bidding capability.
Rather than relying on fixed rules or manually managing hundreds of search terms, Decision continuously monitored live search results to understand the competitive landscape around more than 400 branded keywords.
When competitors appeared against a Bensons search term, Decision could respond by protecting the brand’s paid position. When there was no competitive threat, paid advertising could be suppressed, allowing Bensons’ organic listing to capture the traffic without paying for the click. This happened continuously, removing the need for teams to manually monitor and adjust hundreds of individual search terms.
Reducing spend without sacrificing performance
Simply switching off brand PPC would have introduced significant risk; competitors could have moved into prominent positions against Bensons searches, while changes in organic rankings could potentially have affected traffic from customers already demonstrating high purchase intent.
Instead, we introduced Decision through a phased approach, using historical performance data to understand the relationship between paid and organic search before progressively reducing unnecessary bidding.
Throughout the campaign, reporting monitored total brand traffic across both paid and organic search alongside transactions, conversion rates and revenue.
The results demonstrated that performance was maintained while paid brand costs fell by 99%. Overall, the work:
- generated more than £400,000 in estimated annualised savings
- reduced brand PPC costs by 99%
- maintained brand search traffic, conversions and revenue
- enabled budget to be reinvested into higher-growth search terms and wider digital activity.
Kate Davies-Hinde, Head of Digital Marketing at Bensons for Beds said:
“Jaywing Decision has been a valuable addition to the wider work we’re doing to improve the efficiency of our paid search investment. It’s helped us significantly reduce unnecessary spend on brand terms without compromising traffic, conversions or revenue.
“The scale of the savings has been significant, freeing up budget to reinvest into areas with greater potential to drive incremental growth and supporting the broader improvements we’re making across paid search.”
Applying AI where it can make a measurable difference
There is no shortage of conversation around the potential of AI in marketing. For us, the value comes from applying it to specific problems where better analysis and faster decision-making can create a measurable commercial impact.
Brand bidding is a good example. Search auctions change constantly, which makes managing hundreds of keywords manually difficult and makes simple, static bidding rules increasingly limiting.
Decision brings together machine learning, automation and live search data to make those decisions dynamically. The work with Bensons demonstrates what that can mean in practice: less wasted media spend, greater confidence in where budget is being invested and more money available to put behind activity that can drive incremental growth.
Being named a finalist is brilliant recognition for the teams involved and further evidence of the impact Decision can deliver for brands looking to get more from their media investment.