Paid search can be simply defined as a type of online advertising where users bid for potential clicks on ads that are displayed within the SERPs. One of the distinctive features of paid search is that an advertiser only pays when someone clicks on his ad. Search engines do not charge for displaying an ad. This is the reason why businesses, whether micro or large, love to invest in paid search. Paid ads can be further divided into two categories; display ads and search ads. Pay-per-click (PPC) and search engine marketing (SEM) are two of the terms marketers often use to describe paid search.
Setting up a paid search campaign
Setting up a paid search campaign is an easy task, however, setting up a successful paid search campaign demands skills. Paid search can drain your advertising budget quickly and a flawed campaign can give you a negative return. First of all, you have to set your objectives and develop an understanding of your audience. For that, you have to conduct a thorough research as a part of strategic planning.
Keyword selection is crucial
After clearly defining your objectives and target audience, you can move forward and research keywords for your campaign. The selection of keywords plays a major role in defining the future of a campaign. Bidding on the wrong keywords will be disastrous. Stats suggest that long-tail keywords will help you set up an excellent paid search campaign as long keywords are the less frequent terms that drive highly relevant, convertible traffic (although traffic volume on these keywords would be low as compared to short-tail KWs). In addition, make sure that your keywords are relevant to what your landing page says.
Ad copy
The copy of your ad and landing page plays an important part in defining your average conversion rate. Your ad copy should match the search terms. Optimizing ad copy would help you improve the quality scores and decrease cost-per-click. Google, for example, likes to display ads that visitors will find pertinent and click on. Relevancy and click-through-rate (CTR) are some of key the factors that determine the quality score of an ad.
Measurement
Successful marketers follow the process of continuous improvement in all of their marketing efforts and paid search is no exception. The matrices you define would help you measure and optimize your search ad campaigns. Paid search channels are governed with the help of concrete insights and for this you have to learn how to manage an overwhelming amount of data. There are a number of matrices that would help you understand the traffic on your ad, conversion rate, and overall performance of your paid search campaign. A continuous improvement means that you keep testing, learning, and refining your online marketing campaigns in order to earn higher ROI.
Paid search is a measurable and highly effective way of web marketing, designed to make it easy for your potential customers to find you in the SERPs. It is hard to undermine the importance of inbound marketing and, as a marketer, you need to be where your customers are.