A Brief Guide To Paid Search PPC Marketing

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Businesses must be innovative in their marketing approaches in the digital age if they want to match consumer needs and stay competitive in a constantly shifting market. Paid search is a crucial but frequently overlooked component of digital marketing that can have an enormous impact when done well. Paid search or Pay-Per-Click (PPC) involves using paid ads on search engines to drive visitors to a website.

Some may consider paid search an unnecessary investment, but it has become a crucial tool marketers cannot overlook. This blog post will go over the benefits of sponsored search for businesses, why it’s so important to digital marketing, and how to create a strategy for it. So, let’s get started!

What is Paid Search?

Paid search advertising is a digital marketing technique in which businesses pay search engines to have their ads appear higher on relevant search engine results pages (SERPs) to attract more visitors to their website. PPC advertising, often known as pay-per-click, is the most popular type of paid search.

In a PPC advertising campaign, businesses do not pay anything unless someone clicks on their ad. That said, it is a cost-effective advertising option that guarantees that your ads reach people actively looking for your company’s services or products. Several factors influence where your ad appears in Google SERPs, including:

Bidding: Companies can bid on phrases or keywords relevant to their business, services, or products. The top bids may achieve higher rankings on SERPs.
Ad extensions: Companies can provide phone numbers and web page links to contact pages and other essential details on their website. The influence of these extensions can decide your ad placement on SERPs.
Ad and landing page quality: Google will evaluate your landing pages’ usefulness and relevance and assign a Quality Score for your ads.
Keywords: Using various keywords in your advertising and their frequency can influence the ranking in SERPs.
Other factors: Other factors include the searched keyword, time, location, competing ads/other search results, and device type.

What are the Benefits of a Paid Search Campaign?

Although your website may rank highly with organic SEO, having your company displayed at the top of the results page is the primary advantage of paid search marketing campaigns. Some of the other benefits include:

Target Audience

Keyword research allows businesses to target potential clients and consumers searching for their products or services. For instance, a health food firm is more likely to attract consumers looking for healthy snacks if they utilize paid search advertisements targeting a keyword phrase like “healthy snacks.” The most effective strategy to reach your target audience is to bid on keywords most relevant to your business.

Cost-Effective

Paid search gives you control over how your advertising budget is spent. A billboard might cost you $1,000 or more, but you have no say over who passes it or needs your services. You could use that $1,000 instead of paying for the billboard to promote directly to members of your target market who are actively searching for your products and services online.

Besides being economical, because most search engines employ a bidding style, the market will determine the price of advertisements. If you set a maximum bid of $4 for a term and the next highest bid is under $2, you will pay $2.01.

Businesses frequently pay less than their maximum bid price and can change their bid anytime.

Quick and Efficient Results

Paid search allows firms to see quantifiable results quickly, while many other SEO tactics might take a long time to show significant returns. Paid search advertising employs targeted tactics to identify and connect with consumers specifically looking for your offers while weeding out those who need more convincing to buy. This results in shorter customer journeys and high consumer interest in your offerings.

SEO might take weeks or even months to yield the desired results, whereas paid search ads can place your brand on the first page of Google right after its launch.

How to Set Up PPC Campaigns

You can set up PPC campaigns in the following steps.

Location Settings

Specify which cities, zip codes, and countries you want your adverts to display via location settings. Usually, these options reflect the location of your business or where consumers can purchase your goods.

Keywords

Pick keywords that are relevant to your business and brand recognition. You may find out what keywords customers in your market are searching for and which are the most significant by conducting keyword research.

Tools such as Google Keyword Planner can assist you in determining what keywords people worldwide are searching for to find services and goods similar to yours.

Match Types

Selecting a match type is a prerequisite for bidding on keywords in pay-per-click advertising campaigns. The match type you choose instructs Google’s algorithm how precisely your ads should match user searches. When advertising with Google Ads, you can pick one of three match types.

Exact Match

Exact matches are the most specific. In the past, employing the exact match meant that your ad groups would only show to users who searched for your exact keyword phrase. However, Google has recently updated the criteria to make this type of match less specific. Ads that use exact match may appear when searches contain synonyms, plural forms, or other variants of your keyword or phrase.

The benefit of the precise match is that it allows you to connect with people interested in your particular products or services. Customers are more likely to be interested in your offerings if they click on your advertisement after searching for that particular service, which maintains high conversion rates and lowers unnecessary expenses.

However, as more specialized searches typically have a smaller search volume, you will probably receive fewer visitors if you use the exact match type.

Broad Match

The broad match type reaches the most people. If you select a broad match, your ad may appear whenever a search contains any terms in your key phrase in whatever sequence. Searches with synonyms for your keywords may also bring up your advertisement.

Although the broad match strategy is excellent for increasing click-through rates, it is crucial to monitor search query analytics to ensure you aren’t paying for irrelevant or non-converting traffic. You can set up and employ negative keywords to stop your advertising from appearing in searches that have nothing to do with your business.

Phrase Match

Phrase match combines exact match and broad match. It provides some of the flexibility of the broad match while maintaining control features akin to exact match. Your ad appears only when a person searches for your keywords in the exact sequence you entered them, but other terms may come before or after the keyphrase.

Recently, Google AdWords expanded phrase match to encompass synonyms, plural forms, and other close synonyms of your keywords and key phrases.

Create the Ad

The next step is to craft an ad with a copy that appeals to your target audience and influences them to select it over competing advertising or organic listings on the page. Good ads contain one or more calls-to-action (CTA), words and phrases related to your keywords, and unique and engaging content.

You should avoid a few things while creating your ad, including trademarked words or phrases. Unnecessary spacing, headlines with exclamation points, and words in all caps.

Your advertisements should support rather than undermine your company. Therefore, to produce profitable paid advertisements, include the correct information and avoid prohibited content.

Bids

The amount you wish to pay for each click on any of your ads, including keywords, is entirely up to you. This is called a “Max CPC” or “Bid.” You can select a separate bid amount for every term and keyword combination. Although you still have the final say over how much to bid for each keyword, paid search companies will offer you guidelines.

For instance, if Google suggests a bid of $4 but you prefer to bid $3, you can still do so. On the other hand, if you bid less than the recommended amount, your advertising may display lower on the page or less frequently in the search results.

Ad Extensions

Search engines may display ad extensions alongside your ad to offer additional details about your business. These can improve user experience and boost your ad’s quality score, raising it to the top of the search results page. Some available ad extensions include pricing, location, side links, call out, and phone number.

Ad Launch and Payment

Ads often appear within a few hours, allowing you to see the outcomes in your paid search accounts in a shorter period. Additionally, you can suspend your advertising campaigns whenever you want to make room for new promotions or end older ones. While each paid search platform has a somewhat different charging structure, you should have a similar experience with all of them.

Typically, you will link a credit or debit card to your account when you first open it. After reaching a particular threshold or every 30 days, whichever comes first, you will subsequently be charged.

How do search engines rank ads?

When a customer types in one of your keywords into a search engine, your text or display ads go up for auction. After that, your ad’s placement on the search page is determined by factors including your bid and quality score. The combination of these elements determines your ad rank, and the firm in the auction with the highest ad rank appears first in the search results.

Bid

If your bid is the highest, your quality score determines where you appear on the search engine results page. You will appear higher on the page when you bid more and have a higher quality score.

Quality Score

The quality score ranges from one to ten (10 being the highest), and paid search platforms assign each keyword to your account. Three elements are combined to compute this: landing page experience, ad relevance, and expected clickthrough rate (CTR).

The quality score was devised to prevent marketers from paying the most money to be at the top of pages with search phrases unrelated to their website. Now, paid search networks increasingly reward marketers with higher-quality advertising over those with the most money to spend.

Paid Search (PPC Advertising) vs. Organic SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the technique of improving your website’s ranking without paying search engines. It includes researching the most effective keywords, word count, and so on to rank at the top of organic search results.

SEO may seem a better alternative because once your website ranks high in SERPs, all clicks are free, and many consumers prefer organic search results over paid ones. While the clicks you obtain may not have an immediate monetary cost, SEO frequently requires a significant investment of time and money in the long term.

If your website is new, it may take months or even years before it ranks in the top ten search results. It costs money to put all that effort into SEO, so you should evaluate the expenses of organic SEO and PPC to see which is better for your organization.

Google Ads

Google Ads is Google’s own advertising network. It provides PPC/CPC and CPM advertising. Your advertisements may appear on one or both of Google’s advertising networks when you use Google Ads.

Google Search Network encompasses all advertisements that show on Google search results pages, including Google Shopping, Maps, Google Search, and its other search partners.

Google Display Network comprises all Google-partnered websites and other Google websites like YouTube and Gmail.

If you select CPC or CPM, you can specify the maximum bid amount and whether your bid is manual or automatic. While automated bids entail Google selecting a bid amount within your predetermined budget, manual bids need you to select the bid amount.

Wrapping Up!

There’s no denying that firms should utilize paid search as part of their digital marketing strategy. Paid search is crucial for raising a company’s online visibility, bringing more customers to its website, and eventually boosting revenue. Businesses may accomplish their marketing objectives and stay competitive in the current digital era by investing in paid search advertising.

Are you prepared to advance your ad optimization efforts? Get in touch with Hashe right now to see the difference for yourself!

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