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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Retargeting or Remarketing–you may have heard these buzz words before, but do you know what they really mean? You should! Below I will describe to you seven typical retargeting tactics and how to best use them to reach your low hanging fruit: customers and prospects most likely to convert or take an action on your website.
First off, there are two main types of Retargeting: On-Site and Off-Site. On-site is typically used as a retention tool, to keep your prospects engaged, coming back to your site, or even to upsell/cross-sell them; the target is people who have already visited your website. Off-site retargeting, on the other hand, is used as a prospecting tool and adding new customers to your sales funnel that have not already engaged with your website. Below are the several tactical components that fall under each type of Retargeting.
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On-site
- Site Retargeting – This specifically targets individuals who have visited certain pages of your website. By placing a tracking cookie on their browser, you can later serve them ads on other websites based on the content they consumed on your site. Ever see an ad pop up that has the exact shoe you were looking at online yesterday? With a coupon to come back to the site and purchase it? Yep, that’s site retargeting. Common uses are to entice a user to come back to your website with a special promotion, a reminder that they abandoned their shopping cart, or just to keep the brand top of mind.
- SEO/SEM – Here, if a user arrives on your site via a certain keyword through search engines, you can later serve them an ad when they are again browsing in the network. Knowing exactly what they were searching on when they came to your site allows you to be able to target them with appropriate messaging later on.
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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If you’re managing paid search campaigns for your company, or your own business, you’ve probably heard the talks the past year over the Yahoo to Bing transition. If you’ve been living on Mars, then you should know that Yahoo paid search ads will soon be running through the Bing AdCenter, but ads will be shown on both Yahoo And Bing sites. Below are some differences in the two campaign managers and some changes you should make to your accounts.
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