By 2019, U.S. marketers are expected to spend over $103 billion on search, display, social media and email marketing — but search will remain the largest share of interactive spend. This trend represents a 12 percent compound growth rate.
Paid search, as we discussed last week, increases your business’ visibility on the results page of a search engine by revealing ads based on the keywords searched by a user. It is even shown to positively impact organic search click-through rates, making it a no-brainer for any digital marketer. In today’s post, we’ll share more in-depth information on how paid search works, and discuss keyword planning in addition to extensions and ad formats.
When beginning a paid search strategy, you should first identify the keywords most relevant to your business. For example, if you’re a surgical supplies firm in Chicago, bidding on the keyword phrase “Chicago surgical supplies” could result in an ad appearing when a user searches this phrase, thus leading users to your site.
On Google, there are seven available ad positions on each search results page, and the search engine uses a combination of factors including relevance, landing page experience, and expected impact to determine which ads will be shown on each of them. We recommend selecting high quality, relevant keywords for your advertising campaign to help you reach the customers you want at the right time. To make your ads appear when people search for your product or service, the keywords you choose need to match the words or phrases that people use, or should be related to the content of the websites your customers visit. You can also add negative keywords, so your ad doesn’t appear when searches include those terms. This helps reduce costs by ensuring that your ad is shown only to your intended audience.
Research is needed to determine what users are searching for — Google’s Keyword Planning Tool is the ideal place to start. This platform contains data on the keywords you’re considering bidding on, such as average monthly search volume, suggested bid, and ad impression share (the number of impressions your ad received divided by the total number of searches that matched your target audience and the keyword in a given span of time).
Ad formats are the components of an ad shown in Google search results, including headline, descriptions, display URL, and various ad extensions. Ad extensions show extra information about your business within your text ad, such as phone number, location, and rating. These can give your ad more prominence on the search results page, thereby enhancing both visibility and value.
As a warning, Google is currently undergoing a change to their ad format structure. Until recently, all ads were built to the specifications of “standard formatting.” Now, Google has created a way to increase the character limitations of your ads with “enhanced formatting.” While this change will not affect current ads, it will impact ad creation going forward, and will be fully implemented starting October 26, 2016.
89 percent of customers begin their buying process with a search engine, and paid search allows you to bid on the words that will enable you to connect with those who are actively searching for the most relevant aspects of your business. In the next post, we’ll delve deeper into organic search, and our three best practices to make the most out of search engine optimization. In the meantime, check out our past post on killer paid search ads.
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