Paid Search: An Ultimate Guide to Boost Your Marketing Performance

Paid search is a digital marketing strategy where companies pay search engines to place their advertisements higher on relevant search engine results pages. Pay-per-click, or PPC advertising is the most common form of paid search and has the goal of driving traffic to a website.

You can spot paid search ads on Google search results as they are marked by a small green box that says ‘Ad’. Companies are only charged when someone clicks on their ad and is taken to their website.

A strong paid search strategy can offer a wealth of benefits:

• Increased visibility and brand awareness: Paid search helps businesses appear at the top of search results where the majority of clicks occur. This means paid search is great vessel for reaching a wider audience that aren’t yet aware of your brand.
• Valuable data insights: Understand when your ads perform best, which keywords and copy resonate with your target audience and more. Data gained from paid search campaigns will be used to strengthen your future campaigns and inform the strategy.
• Improved website traffic and conversions: paid search will deliver high-quality leads, increased traffic and ultimately, more customers. With a fine tuned strategy, paid search will give a significant boost to your company’s bottom line. 

Where your ads are placed on Google SERPs are dependent on a number of factors that you can influence:

• Bidding: While your campaign is live, bid on related phrases or keywords to boost your position further. The highest bidders get higher rankings on the search results page. 
• Ad extensions: Include phone numbers and links to contact pages or other relevant information on your website. Your ad placement on SERPs can be determined by the impact of these extensions. 
• Quality of ads and landing pages: Google will assess and assign a Quality Score for ads, based on how useful and relevant your landing pages are. To improve in this area, your content must be relevant to your industry, an engineering company writing an unrelated piece on the state of hospitality? Not likely to score well with Google.
• Keywords: The use of several keywords in your ads as well as the frequency of use, can determine the ranking on SERPs.

Ready to get started with a paid search campaign? Here’s our step-by-step guide:

• Location Settings: Choose where your ads are shown, from as general as countries to more specific targeting like cities or post codes. Typically, brands will tailor these settings to where they are based or where customers can get their products.
• Keywords: Choosing keywords is fundamental to nailing any paid search campaign. Keyword research is therefore of the utmost importance before you kickoff any campaign. This will help you to understand what your target audience are searching for, and which ones are most significant. Google Keyword Planner will give you what directly what you ask for, but at Propeller we want a tool that offers more than that, like what our competitors are ranking for and similar keywords. Instead, we use Ahrefs and SE Ranking to conduct keyword research and ensure we are delivering the best keywords for ourselves and our clients.
• Match Types: Before bidding on keywords in your campaigns, you have to choose a match type. This tells Google’s algorithm how closely you want your ads to match user searches. There are three match types to choose from when using Google Ads:
• Exact Match: This is the most specific match type, where your ads will match searches containing plurals, synonyms or other variations of your keyword or phrase. This match type enables companies to reach audiences that are searching for specific products or services. If consumers click on your ad after searching for a specific item, its more likely they’ll be interested in your offerings, which keeps conversion rates high and reduces budget wasted on clicks that don’t convert. However, you will likely have less traffic when using the exact match type, as more specific searches often have a lower search volume.
• Broad Match: Choosing this option will reach the widest audience, as broad matches can appear whenever a search includes any of the words in your keyphrase, in any order. This approach works great in driving clicks through to your website, however, it doesn’t necessarily bring a high conversion rate. To prevent paying for traffic that isn’t interested in your services, you can set up negative keywords. These will prevent your ads from appearing in searches that are unrelated to your company.
• Phrase Match: A phrase match is a combination of exact and broad match types. Your phrase matched ad will appear when users conduct a search that includes your keywords in the exact order you enter them, but other words can be included before or after the key-phrase. Companies should use phrase match for a balance between reach and relevance. It’s a great way to increase traffic while maintaining a degree of targeting.

When creating your ad, focus on writing copy that engages your target audience and convinces them to choose your product over other ads or organic listings. Be sure to include:

• Calls-to-action
• Words and phrases related to your keyword
• Engaging content

Be conscious of your character count, this is an exercise in being concise and to the point. Include the topline information and avoid superfluous sentences.

You have complete control over how much you want to pay per click of one of your ads, however Google will recommend a bid price to give brands guidance. While you can enter a lower bid for the keyword, it could mean your ads will appear lower on the page, or appear less frequently in searches. 

Give more information about your company with ad extensions that appear with your ad on search engines. As additional benefits, using ad extensions will provide an improved user experience and increase your ad’s quality score. Here are some of the ad extensions available:

• Pricing
• Location
• Site links
• Phone number

After a few hours of launching your ads will start showing, and you can view the real-time results in your account. Post-launch, you have the option to pause your campaigns at any point to accommodate new promotions or discontinue outdated campaigns. 

Your quality score and bid are taken into account to determine where your ad will appear on the search page. The business in the bidding auction with the highest ad rank will be at the top of search results. 

We’ve discussed bidding, but how do you improve your quality score? This is a 1-10 score system, and every keyword in you account is assigned by paid search platforms. The calculation is based on three factors:

• Expected click-through rate
• Ad relevance
• Landing page experience

The quality score was established to prevent advertisers getting the top spot by having the biggest budget alone. This has stopped irrelevant ads being offered to users when they search. 

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of increasing your website’s search ranking organically. While there are not immediate costs associated with SEO, it does take a lot of time and potentially more money in the long term. 

With our proven strategies and team of digital experts ready to get involved in the next paid search project, we welcome the opportunity to take on any new proposals. If you are looking to take your business to the next level and gain more traffic and conversions in the process, the is no time like the present to get started.