Paid Advertising is an essential tool for getting your audience to your website and should be a key element of any brand or business’ website marketing strategy. With a wealth of options and channels available, what’s in it for you and your business? And, where do you start?
In this post, we’ll be focusing on PPC Advertising, or Pay-per-click marketing, a model of paid advertising that is part of Search Engine Marketing (this is often shortened to SEM).
Pay-per-click advertising is when the advertiser only pays for the ad if it gains
interactions, so for example if your ad doesn't get any clicks, you don’t pay (or in rare cases
there might be a minimum payment). But if 12 people click on your ad, you pay for those 12
clicks. The price will be rated on a price-per-click. With this in mind, PPC or Paid Advertising
offers a control over budget that is extremely useful. Whether you’re using GoogleAds or Facebook Ads, you have the ability to control your ad spend in minute detail by letting the system know your budget.
If these ads are used with search engines such as Google or Bing, they are the ads that appear at the top of your screen before the rest of the rankings of results. Only a certain amount of websites appear on the first page of search engine results and so these paid advertisements are utilised by businesses to attract the attention of searchers in this prime location. Since the use of keywords has become more and more competitive, Pay-per-click advertising, although it can be expensive, can give chances to websites that don’t make it into the top ranking.
Before you get started, it is essential that you have a strategy in place for:
1. Understanding Your Customer
Before embarking on any campaign, it is so important that you take the time to understand and refine your buyer persona(s), customer journeys and your sales funnel. Pay particular attention to key aspects such as drop-off points (points in the customer journey where they leave the pathway prior to making a purchase), as having a strategy that is thoroughly informed by your customer and their experience is essential to generating results!
With Paid Advertising, you can target not only the general demographics of your desired
audience, but also based on their interests, behaviours, employment titles, and more. So you can get into granular detail with your audience and buyer personas. This means that your ad will appear in front of the relevant people, increasing the conversion rates of your campaign.
2. Knowing Your Keywords
It’s important to understand how potential customers will find you and what they will be searching for in order to get to your website. In our previous post, “The long and short of Keywords”, we discussed the differences between long-tail keywords and short-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are usually more than three words long, whereas short-tail keywords are usually three words or less.
Long-tail keywords can be extremely useful when it comes to paid advertising. Thinking about Google AdWords in particular, imagine you are searching for an interior design company in your local area. When searching, you will select certain words in order to narrow down the results that Google may serve up to you.
At first you might just search for the short-tail keywords like “Interior Design” (Google might then ask to access your location in order to narrow down the search). This may bring up a list of interior designers in your area, but it may also list other irrelevant items like Interior design courses, or interior design blogs.
Instead you could search for something more specific using long-tail keywords. You might now search, “Interior design companies hull”, or if you want to specify even further you may search for “interior design companies, hull, commercial property”, and be served exactly what you need.
If you are an interior design company in Hull that specialises in commercial properties, when you are planning your ad campaign, the last option we mentioned would be the ideal words that you would bid on for your ad. They are the words in which you would pay for your ad to appear. You would also use some of the short-tail keywords too, but the specifics are important for finding a relevant audience.
When choosing the keywords to bid on when creating your Google Ad campaign, it is
important that you research trending keywords, and understand your potential customers, their motivations and their barriers in order to appear where you are needed. Having an ad that looks great is certainly important, but if it isn’t relevant to the user viewing it, it isn’t going to generate leads or contribute meaningfully to business objectives.
So, before you get going on a Paid Ads campaign, make sure you’ve done the work to get to know your customers, their needs, their experience, and how they find you.
Here’s a glossary of some terms we covered too in case you need to revisit them:
Paid Advertising Key Phrases
Look out for upcoming Podcast episodes and blog posts on Google AdWords and Facebook Paid Ads in more detail, but we hope you found this introduction helpful!
About the Author: Stephanie Weekes
Stephanie is a Freelance Social Media Manager and Marketing Consultant. With almost 10 years of experience working in-house with global brands and agencies, she has an in-depth understanding of multi-channel marketing and brand management.
IG: @stephgetssocial