Digital advertising has become a fiercely competitive landscape over the last decade. As more & more companies move their advertising online, the market has become overcrowded, which continues to drive your costs up. Paid search ads (including PPC or pay-per-click) have long been a successful way to find potential customers through digital advertising. Art Unlimited would like to give you a few simple ways to help lower your costs and leverage your paid search ads to help your business grow.
1. Optimizing For Keywords
Keywords are the foundation of any successful paid search ad campaign. After all, they determine what search terms your ads will show up for. An effective starting place for optimizing keywords is to write down all of the services and products your company offers. You have a choice of tools to identify roughly 15-30 keywords based on your services or products. An easy, free tool that can help you come up with keyword ideas is the Google search engine itself. Simply enter your service or product to see the popular results Google suggests related to those services or products. Those suggested keywords are a great place to begin! Once you have a list of solid keywords, you’ll need to group them within the account. There are many ways to do this, depending on the ad platform. The important thing is to keep related theme keywords together.
Now that your keywords are grouped by common themes, you can optimize them more effectively. Run match-type tests on these new keywords, and try altering the same keyword in broad terms, phrases, and exact matches. These tests should be run for at least two months (preferably longer) to see the best results. As the months go on, identify and remove the match types that aren’t bringing success. Typically, these are seen in broad match types because search engines will show them in the results for a much wider range of searches. These searches may not have relevant intent and will drive costs up without a return. If a broad match type is doing well and you’d like to keep it running, try using negative keywords to counter searches you don’t want to show for. Keep in mind that this is a time-consuming process and will need to be checked regularly. The final and arguably most important way of optimizing keywords is to ensure that the ad copy for these keywords includes your targeted keywords. Read on as we explore this further.
2. Ad Copy
Creating compelling, effective ad copy always has the goal of persuasion. You’ve probably read this before, but it is truly important to make sure your ad copy is an attention grabber. It should have a sense of urgency and an emotional impact, and we always like to include a unique selling point. Unique selling points answer the question, “What sets your company apart?”
Once these foundational aspects are established, the next step is to find clever ways to include your targeted keywords. Having your keywords in your ad copy will improve rankings, which will not only encourage search engines to show your ad more but can also lower the cost of the ad placement. Google Ads has an auction process that considers the highest bid, the keyword, and the ad copy ranking. This process allows you to get clicks at a lower price and gives you an advantage over your competitors.
3. Bid Strategy Guidance
One of the most common mistakes we see in accounts is not giving the ads platform the proper information needed to optimize your bidding. All search ad platforms are different, but we’ll use Google Ads as an example since it’s the most prominent search platform.
Specify Goals
Google uses a wide range of tools to calculate your ads bid, so it’s essential to tell the platform precisely what you want to get out of the service. Are you looking to have potential customers visit your website to submit a lead form or call your business? If so, setting your bidding strategy to maximize conversions is essential.
Define Conversions
The second step is to ensure that these calls and form fills are added as conversions to Google Ads. This will give the ad platform guidance on your goals and help you keep track of your cost per action.
Learning
The final recommendation for giving the bid strategy guidance is to let the platform learn over time. During this period, you will see “Bid Strategy Learning” on the Google Ads platform. It’s important not to make any more changes at this time! The platform uses machine learning to optimize what to do and what not to do. Making repeated changes in an effort to get quicker results can do the opposite and will set the process back. We have seen too many companies make multiple changes daily and damage their once-thriving Google Ads account.
Positioning Your Business for Success
In the coming years, Google Ads and its competitors intend to expand their ad platforms, making the digital ad markets even more competitive. By optimizing your keywords, crafting compelling ad copy, and properly setting your bid strategy, you can set yourself up for a successful future.
Connect with Art Unlimited if you have further questions about Paid Search and how we can help with your company’s strategy.
