With your content strategy or website, you should always put organic success at the forefront of your planning. While paid search can be part of your digital marketing strategy and bring instant results or leads, you should rely on strong content and SEO to drive your organic success for the long term.
However, paid search can still be an effective form of marketing. It allows you to deliver targeted promotional messages to a highly targeted audience. It can let you place ads in front of your customer at the very moment they’re looking for you. It’s also relatively inexpensive and anyone can use it.
Here are a few pros and cons of each:
Organic Search
PRO: You “own” the result. Once you get your top result, you’ve earned it and it’s a challenge to lose that spot.
PRO: It’s cheaper to get to the top organically than to continue to pay for paid spots.
CON: It’s a lengthy process and can take a long time to get a top ranking.
Paid Search
PRO: You have control over when you appear, and for what keywords.
PRO: You gain visibility faster.
CON: It can be expensive, and shouldn’t be your long term strategy. When you stop paying, your traffic stops too.
How Paid Search Works
Paid search works like an auction, where you set a bid for your ad to appear in someone’s search engine result for a pre-determined query. The position in which your ad appears in the search engine results page (SERP) is determined by both what you’re willing to spend, and your quality score.
How to determine a bid
Your price = The ad rank of the person below you/your quality score + $0.01
What is a quality score?
You may have noticed that something called a "quality score" factors into your bidding process. It basically speaks to the "quality" of the experience your website is providing, and whether or not it's answering your visitors' questions.
You can improve your quality score by having relevant ad copy and a good landing page. The ad copy should be relevant to the keyword and user search-it should genuinely be answering the user’s question and describing what’s really on the page to which they’ll be clicking through.
For e.g., if your ad promises shoes and users click through to find tee shirts, they'll bounce right out, and back to the SERP (search engine results page). Having this happen will negatively affect your quality score and drive up the cost of your paid campaigns.
A/B Testing
Ensure you run A/B tests in your paid search campaigns. You can closely monitor which ads are getting more clicks and performing better, and pull the ads that don’t perform as well. This helps you optimize your budget and saves you some dollars.
You’d be surprised how simple copy changes can make all the difference in the click through rate on paid search ads.
What should I test? (one at a time):
Long copy or short copy
Headline
CTA (call to action)
Image
Types of Targeting In Paid Search Campaigns
These are some of the targeting options you'll face when working with paid campaigns:
Contextual: Ad displayed alongside content that aligns with what you’re advertising
Behavioural: Uses the information from a user’s web browsing history in order to place them in an audience. A Behavioural audience may be “Affinity” (long term browsing habits) or “In market” (short term or what they’re searching right now rather than historically).
Custom: A remarketing tool using a custom audience who may have already visited your site
Lookalike: An audience that matches a set of criteria or another, similar audience
Difference between Search and Display Campaigns
Search campaigns target users who are actively search for something, and are text based. You pay for clicks. With search, you’re getting in front of people who are looking for you, and your ads resemble search engine results.
Display campaigns on the other hand are based on graphics and video. They help you create brand awareness, and create impressions rather than drive conversions. You pay per impression, whether or not you get a click. You would use display campaigns to raise awareness and if you have a video or image to showcase.
Quick and simple? That's just an intro into paid search!
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