Paid Search Strategy

Social media marketing is a great way to build brand engagement, but it’s not always guaranteed to produce a return on investment.

There are some strategies that have always been effective for search engines. They are called Paid Search and Pay-per-click. They are still effective for your investment.

Paid search advertising is hard to miss when searching for something on Google.

This article provides tips on how to paid search strategy and PPC success.

Paid Search in Your Marketing Strategy

Paid search advertising means that your ad will be one of the first a customer sees when they search for a product or service that you offer. This is especially useful if your SEO efforts have not yet had the desired results.

PPC can help you achieve your sales objective if you have a broad target audience, and even if your target market is niche-specific, a paid search strategy can help, as long as you’re specific about the geographic location you’re targeting.

Value of a Paid Search Strategy

Paid search is a key part of any search marketing strategy. The advantages of a paid search strategy are obvious, and it can be very beneficial.

• Clear ROI: It provides a clear ROI which everyone loves to see within a business. Your spend is clear, and your returns are very clear.
• Direct response channel: So, you can optimize towards whichever action you want. It could be an app install, it could be a click, whatever it happens to be you can optimize to that. And this makes it generally distinct from brand-focused marketing which would look at some of the softer metrics.
• Drives scalable conversions: If your strategy is going well and you fund the ROAS or ROI that you’re looking for, you can experiment quite a lot and see how far you can actually take that. In a lot of businesses, as long as you’re hitting that ROAS or ROI target, you can scale. Because they know that there’s profit to be made from it. So, there’s always budget available for that sort of thing.
• Retains customers: The fourth benefit is something that’s not quite so recent to us, but it’s still developing is re-marketing. And the beauty of re-marketing is that it allows us to retain customers. It can also allow us to convert. And the cost-per-click tends to be a lot lower for re-marketing because it is taken as read that these are people who’ve interacted. They may have visited the site and added something to a basket but not converted. As a result, when we re-market to them, the cost-per-click is lower because their intent is quite clear.

Match Types

Budgets can become uncontrolled if care is not taken when creating them. For example, using a broad match when an exact match would have been more effective, or vice versa. This can result in missing out on a lot of opportunities.

There are clear benefits to using these match types that can improve the efficiency of your campaign. Knowing the limitations and benefits of each match type will allow you to use your budget much more effectively and hit your goals.

• Broad match: These are ads that show on searches that include misspellings, synonyms, related searches, and other relevant variations. So, you might want to do this if you have a catch-all term and you know anything related to that is going to be relevant enough to your brand.
• Phrase match: These are ads that will show on a specific phrase and close variations of that phrase. We have exact match which will show on the exact term or very close variations of that term. It’s one to use if you know exactly what you’re going after.
• Negative match: Something else that is crucial to get right is negative matching. This is, quite simply, as it sounds, is using negative matching means that your ads will not show on the terms that you have specified. You can also include a match type to a negative. So, you can phrase match a negative keyword to make sure you’re just not involved or related to anything around that. It can be very important for branding, but from a purely pragmatic point of view, you can waste a lot of budget if you have a negative match to the correct terms.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Match Types

Exact Match

It is advantageous to use this method because it is highly targeted. The ad copy and landing pages can be personalized because you know what someone has searched for.

You can guess what their purpose is from the context and then write your copy accordingly. The main disadvantage is that you will miss out on many chances. This is best used in conjunction with other methods.

Some keywords can be placed into buckets, however it is important to also use phrases and broad matches to reach the largest potential audience.

Phrase Match

Phrase matching can help you capture traffic for keywords you’re not actively bidding on. This is useful because search queries frequently change.

New searches are made every day that are related to products and services. If phrase match is used, then those searches can be utilized.

As long as you have correctly excluded the keywords you don’t want, you will also miss out on the keywords you do want.

While phrase match is useful, it doesn’t consider different word orders. This is something to keep in mind when comparing it to exact match and broad match.

Broad Match

If you use broad match, you can find new keywords and see which ones are performing well.

You can remove underperforming keyword phrases from your negative keyword list, and the ones that are performing well can be moved into your exact match keyword list. Remember that broad match keywords have their limitations; this should be self-explanatory.

If you are promoting a website, app, or video, you will likely capture a lot of irrelevant traffic. It is important to be prepared for this.

You can learn a lot from that, and it can shape negative and exact matching thereafter, but you should set this aside in a separate budget for some of your broad matching.

PPC Best Practices to Adopt in 2022

As consumer habits and technology change over time, the effectiveness of PPC campaigns can change as well. What worked in the past might not work as well in the future.

It is important to keep up with the latest changes in search engines and social media platforms. Staying on top of trends will ensure that your PPC campaigns are effective and generate good results.

1. Set PPC goals

It’s important to have specific goals for your paid search marketing campaign, so that you can measure your progress towards them. Without goals, it’s difficult to tell whether your campaign is successful.

Some examples of PPC goals are:

Increasing sales and revenue

You can target your campaign towards people who have already shown interest in your product or service. This way, you will have a better chance of increasing your sales.

The key to boosting your sales via paid search is to use keywords that are specific to what your target audience is searching for. Generic keywords will not bring you any clicks.

The keywords that are more specific and targetted towards what you are selling will cost more, but it is more likely that the person clicking on the link from the search engine is actually interested in what you are selling.

Increasing site traffic

Choose keywords that are broad-ranging but still relevant to your site to increase traffic successfully. Keep your keywords broad so you’ll get more clicks.

PPC ROI can be maximized by increasing web traffic and making sure your content and website structure is effective.

Overshadowing the competitors

You can make your offer seem better than your competitor’s by bidding on keywords they have already branded. By doing this, you will be able to show up in the search results when someone looks for your competitor, and convince them to go with you instead.

If you are able to improve your product so that it outperforms that of your competitors, you will not only take away their revenue, but also have an opportunity to market your own product as being superior.

Increasing profits

The main objective of every marketing strategy should be to make more money. With PPC, this should be seen as a long-term objective because there is no guarantee that it will provide instant profit.

You need to try different things, find the words that work best, have a website that looks good, make sure what you are offering is valuable, and be patient.

Brand acknowledgement

Selling your products with your logo on them through ads to a new audience can help increase the trust people have in your company.

A more specific list of PPC goals can look like the following:

• A certain amount of users to click on an ad and complete a lead generation form.
• Paid search should bring 200 new leads per month from your website.
• The cost per click (CPC) shouldn’t exceed $2.50.
• The PPC visitor time on the website should be more than the time spent by those who open the site organically.

2. Personalize Your Ads

You can use your list of leads to create targeted ads on YouTube, Gmail Sponsored, or on the search engine.

With Google Customer Match, you can target ads to people based on whether they’re in your customer database. You can also create similar audiences to reach people with similar demographics and interests.

3. Single Keywords Ad Group 

Pairing your keywords into a unique ad group ensures that the keywords that you bid for equal the search term that you’ve paid for. For example, if you sell custom tuxedos, the keywords inside one SKAG would look like this:

+custom +made +tuxedos “custom made tuxedos” [custom made tuxedos]

SKAG can help improve your PPC campaign by providing a stronger keyword foundation.

4. Target Bottom-of-the-Funnel Keywords

If you’re having trouble converting ad clicks into actual sales, it could be because you’re targeting users who are at the top of the funnel. These users may not be ready to purchase, or they may not be at the stage of the buyer’s journey where they’re considering making a purchase.

If you’re only interested in leads that are ready to buy, then you should focus on BOFU keywords. This will help you avoid any leads that aren’t ready to purchase yet.

Assessing BOFU keywords with an understanding of the niche determinology and phrases that are used in your industry. On those phrases, you need to attach bottom-of-the-funnel keywords that prompt people to the CTA, such as:

• Buying-related words such as “get a quote”, “proposal”
• Branded terms
• Competitor terms
• Contact words like “contact”, “call us”
• Location: city/state/region/zip code

If you want to know how many competitors you have for a certain keyword, look at the CPC. A higher CPC indicates that there are probably many competitors bidding on the same word.

5. Tell Google what’s negative

You should also add negative keywords to your PPC campaign. Negative keywords are keywords that you don’t want to target and that Google shouldn’t feature your ad when people enter those keywords into their search query.

It is important that you do not spend too much of your budget on ads that are not effective.

Go to your Keyword Planner tool, and under Keywords and Targeting, select Negative.

Save your list and proceed to create your campaign.

6. Retarget for Long-Tail Keywords

Retargeting is a marketing strategy that focuses on presenting your offer to people who have already shown an interest in it. By following people around the internet and providing them with targeted ads, you can increase the chances that they will come back to your website and take action.

If someone searches for a particular term on your website, you can show them an advertisement related to that search.

Long-tail keywords are valuable because they are specific and have lower CPC.

7. Use the Lookalike Feature

The people who fill out forms or make purchases on your website after clicking on your ads typically have similar traits. Google AdWords uses data from their activity on search engines and your page to develop audiences known as Similar Audiences.

When you finish making your remarketing list, Google will automatically generate two more lists: one of people who chose your service and one of people with similar interests to your customers.

If you use Similar Audiences along with your CPC strategy, you’ll give the search engine more data that it can use to target keyword bids to users who are more likely to convert.

8. Tailor Your Landing Pages to Different Audiences

You create your PPC campaign with the goal of bringing customers to your landing pages.

You can change each element on your landing page based on what the user searched.

By using dynamic landing pages, you can advertise a different experience precisely targeted in real time for the right target audience. This requires a bit of technical work and development and if you don’t have the expertise for it, we advise you to ask for professional help:

• Create GTM variables based on query parameters.
• Change the JavaScript-based content on your landing page based on the parameters.
• Manage the content in GTM to allow the campaign manager to have full access in order to modify the messages.

9. Optimize for Mobile

As mobile devices become more and more common, they are playing a bigger role in our lives. This trend does not appear to be slowing down.

It is essential for businesses that rely on paid search advertising to take mobile into account when crafting their ad campaigns. This is because an increasing number of people are using mobile devices to search the internet.

To be successful in the digital landscape, it is important to optimize your PPC ads for mobile platforms.

When creating ads, you should consider adding click-to-call buttons, or making sure that the ads are responsive to smaller screens.