Have you ever looked something up on Google and the first couple of links that pop up say “Ad” before them? That is what you would call a paid search. Paid search is a digital marketing strategy in which businesses pay for their ads to be displayed on the top of search engine pages. The way that paid search works is that a business starts by:
- creating a campaign based on goals and keywords
- the customer searches for the keyword and the ad appears
- the customer clicks on the ad and is taken to your website
- the business pays for the click on the website
When using paid search, as a business, you want to understand all the factors that go into your ad appearing first. These factors are bid amount, ad and landing page quality, ad thresholds, popularity of keywords, context of search, and impact of ad extensions. The bid amount is the amount of money a business is willing to spend for a single click, so the more money the higher the ad with be. Ad and landing page quality are measurements of how well experience your ad. This means the usefulness of the ad, for example, was it user-friendly and did it meet the expectations of the user. Ad thresholds are the ability of your ad to compete. These are measured by the quality, position, topic, and nature of the search.
Another factor you want to understand and assess is the impact of ad extensions. Ad extensions include phone numbers, pricing, etc. Having ad extensions could increase the visibility of your ad or enhance the user experience. The last factor to consider is the context of the search. However, this factor cannot be controlled by the business. What people are searching for and how they are doing it is not something controllable by monitoring the results and focusing on the factors mentioned above one can get the full potential out of their paid search.
Creating an ad and implementing it might seem easy, however there are many steps to making sure that your ad is effective. When creating your ad, you want to ensure that your goal for the ad is clear and define key performance indicators. Are you looking to increase sales or spread brand awareness? You must set your goals, to be able to measure your results. Another step to implement paid search is choosing the match types that fits your goal best. A match type refers to the options businesses have to control the reach and specificity of their keywords. Some commonly used match types include broad match, modified broad match, phrase match, and exact match. Implementing converse tracking and analytics is another important step. Just like any other action, one wants the best results and to optimize your paid search, a business must track the results.
The physical ad itself must also be created with a few factors in mind because this is possibly one of the most important parts of your paid search. As a business, you can have the highest bid on the ad but if your ad/website does not align with the user’s search your money will be wasted. As a business, you want to start with an engaging headline to be able to grab the user’s attention. Then, you want to fill the rest of the ad with information that your user will find compelling and end the ad with a strong call to action.
Lastly, once again, ensure that your ad/website is relevant and aligns with the user’s search as best as possible. Paid search is a go as you learn marketing strategy and if you want to be able to implement it correctly you must test your ad. Monitoring and analyzing your performance data is important. You must also test different variations and elements to identify where you can improve or to see what is working or not working for the ad. Paid search and implementing effectively is crucial to growing your business digitally.
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