If you’re considering running paid search ads for your business, it’s important to take the time to ask yourself the right questions and do some research before diving in. This may be an obvious statement, but it’s important to stress given some dangerous assumptions that get made about paid search.
For example, a jelly bean store might assume that paid search for them means making sure their ads are seen every time someone searches online for “jelly beans.” But that searcher might be wondering how the delightful candy is made or when it was invented. Or they might be looking for t-shirts with jelly bean drawings on them or for online stores that sell and ship jelly beans in bulk. Does this jelly bean store want pay for a click on their ad from one of these online searchers? This is a question the store needs to answer before they spend their money on very broad paid search terms.
With that, here’s the general set of questions and research that needs to be carefully completed before you can find success in paid search engine advertising.
What’s the goal?
You’ve decided to invest in advertising your business online. There must be a reason behind this.
- Was it to drive overall brand awareness?
- Or to gauge interest in a soon-to-be launched product through email signups?
- Or to increase new sales (whatever a “sale” is for you)?
Whatever you answer, you should revisit it at every step along the way of this process to make sure your decisions align with this end goal.
Know who you’re targeting
This should be a pretty simple one, since you know your business best, but it’s not to be taken lightly. This is an important time to get reacquainted with your audience. If your goal was to increase sales for your business, then ask yourself what you know about your typical new prospect:
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It’s time to get reacquainted with an old web marketing friend: Google AdWords. In case a recap is needed, this is the platform through which ads are developed and managed for display on Google’s search engine results pages (the listings you see at the very top of the page, above the organic listings, and stacked along the right side of the page).
With new social media tools constantly being introduced and ever-evolving mobile marketing technologies to stay on top of, AdWords is really a breath of fresh not-so-traditional-advertising-but-more-traditional-than-social-media-and-stuff air.
Yes, a good marketing strategy includes a combination of tactics designed to work together to achieve a common goal, and that may mean introducing some newer options. But in all the excitement of what’s new and popular, have you forgotten about some “older” standbys? Paid search advertising through AdWords might be just what you need to pump some new (old) life into your online marketing.
Let’s look at a few benefits of Google AdWords to remind ourselves why this is:
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- First things first: Bing is out there and growing. It’s an important search engine to many and should be considered in your interactive marketing plans. But Google still has the much larger market share, so that’s why we’re focusing on it.
- Adwords’ paid search ads allow you to target an Internet user at precisely the moment they are searching for what you sell. And if you optimize your ad, campaign settings, and landing page well, your ad should gain optimal exposure to this target audience member. You don’t have that kind of control within the organic side of the search engine listings.
In the spirit of optimization, we often sit in on online seminars about new technologies or topics important to our industry. Gotta keep this machine well-oiled! I recently sat in on a search marketing web seminar that was all about keyword research. Now, as these things tend to be, it was largely a sales pitch. Hrmpf. But, it did provide a nice reiteration of some best practices (so quick nod to the host of the webinar, paid search reporting platform, ClickEquations).
This inspired me to spread the continuing education love and share some small steps you must be taking in your keyword research and selection to make your paid search advertising campaigns successful.
Before you set up a campaign, you always start with your planning phase—the volume research, the competitive analysis, etc. This is an important phase. More important, though, is what comes after you launch your campaign: the keyword optimization. It’s important that you keep an eye on your keywords, measure performance, and use your findings to perfect your paid efforts.
Things to look for during the keyword optimization phase:
Absolutely review your search query reports regularly
- This tells you what detailed searches your visitors are actually finding you through and can drive a lot of your decisions regarding bidding strategies, budgets, negative keywords and more.
Look for themes and opportunities to break out campaigns or ad groups
- Your search query reports should start to reveal some behavioral trends among your visitors and give you ideas about how to narrow down your messages into more targeted ad groups.
Implement Exact Match on well-performing words
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