How Paid Search Marketing Works

Paid search marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies that quickly generates website traffic and revenue. To acquire this means you need to advertise your website within the sponsored listings of a search engine. Every time someone clicks your ads that appear in the listings you need to pay a fee either for cost-per-click (CPC) or cost per thousand impressions (CPM) bidding process.

How it works

Every time someone does a search query in any search engine browser, it provides a list of related sites referred as “search engine results page” (SERP). The “Search Query” visualises the process of typing a word (keyword) in the small search box whether you’re using Bing, Yahoo or Google’s search engine. There are two basic types of search marketing in SERP, the search engine optimisation (SEO) and the Pay-Per-Click (PPC).

Notice that on the image below; there’s a small green icon “Ad” that indicates those lists of sites provided by the SERP are for paid search marketing. The list of websites that appears below the PPC are those sites that are well optimised and freely generated through Google algorithms to provide the most accurate search related queries of the users.  The higher your website on SERP appearances is, the more likely for it to gain traffic.

 

6 Basic Search Network Only Campaign Setups

 

1. Campaigns

Campaigns are used to organise and categorise your products, and services offered. It also comprises different Ad Groups, Ad texts, keywords, and bids. It also shares location targeting, budget and other settings.

 

To start with the campaign, follow these steps:

1. Sign into your AdWords accounts and click on the campaign tab.
2. Click the campaign button and choose search network only from the drop-down menu. Give your campaign a name and select your campaign subtype.
3. If you’re a new advertiser or you just want to set up your campaign quickly without additional options, only choose the standard campaign subtype.
4. If you want to use other feature assets, create rich media ads or target the sites specifically for your ads or topics for specific pages, then use the all feature subtype.  

2. Ad Groups

Every Adwords campaign needs an Ad group and every experienced advertiser will use multiple Ad groups to organise their campaign. Ad groups is a shared set of keywords, bids and ads composed into useful themes.

To start creating your Ad group, simply follow these steps:

1. Sign into your Adwords account and click the campaign tab, then click all online campaigns.
2. Click the name of the campaign that you’d like to add to an Ad Group. Select the Ad Group tab and click the new Ad Group button.
3. On the Ad Groups page, enter a descriptive name to create your first ad for this Ad Group. Fill up the boxes provided an e.g. headline, description 1, description 2, display URL, and landing pages.
4. Make sure that you follow the guidelines so your ad is approved promptly.

Note:  You need to enter a list of keywords for the new Ad Group.Those keywords will trigger any ads within the list of Ad groups to show. This is recommended to avoid duplicating keywords from the Ad Groups within the same campaign.

3. Keywords

Keywords are words or phrases that match your ads every time the customer searches in Google search box. Selecting the right keywords are more likely to increase your sales, website traffic and leads. It’s an essential core that will help show and lead customers to your ads. You can either include the keyword in the headline, display URL, or in the description line.

Steps in setting up your keywords:

1. Click any of your AD campaigns.
2. Click the keywords tab.
3. Navigate and click the red button “+KEYWORDS” shown on the image below.

4. Negative keywords

A “negative keyword” is a type of keyword that is preventing your ad from showing when a particular word or phrase is used in a search. It commands Google not to show your ads to users who are searching those negative keywords that you filtered.

Filtering negative keywords increases the chance of your campaign showing the exact search results that your visitors are looking for. For example, when you’re selling fresh flowers online, but you do not sell any artificial flowers, you will filter the word or keyword “artificial flowers” so they will not be triggered to show on your visitors’ searches.

Steps in checking your negative keywords:

1.  Go to campaigns.
2.  Click one of your campaigns.
3.  Click on the Keywords tab.
4.  Navigate to the Negative keywords tab.

5. Ad Text

Ad text is a form of compelling marketing communication that mainly describes your website’s features and offers. It appears in Google results across different Google networks that include Search Network, Display Network, and Search Partners. It is composed of 3 parts: headline text, a description text, and a display URL.

Writing a successful ad text:

1. Make sure it’s unique.
2. Highlight the prices, promotion, and exclusives.
3. Persuade customers to take action.
4. Include at least 1-2 keywords.
5. Match your ad text to your specific and customised landing pages.
6. Attract customers using mobile ads.
7. Do a lot of experimenting.
8. Check the most common ad text mistakes.

6. Landing Page

Unique Adwords landing pages are the key to converting your customers into leads. It measures how your website provides exactly what people are looking for. Effective landing pages should be compelling, creative and have a fill-up form to empower your customers to take action. Compelling landing pages could increase your Ad Rank as it measures the user experience that will affect your CPC and position in the Ad Auction.

Steps on how to improve your landing page experience:

1. Offer useful, relevant and original content.
2. Provide transparency and nurture trustworthiness on your site.
3. Make mobile and desktop navigation menus smooth and easy.
4. Speed and more speed to decrease your landing pages’ load time.
5. Make your site mobile-friendly (test it using the free Google mobile-friendly checker, visit Google Mobile SEO)

Image source www.creditfileexperts.com.au

 

Recommendations

If you’re having difficulty in launching your first paid search marketing campaign, fill up the forms below, and we will provide you with the recommended setup to target your specific audiences.