Guide to Paid Search Advertising

Ah, paid search. I’ve lost count of the amount of times potential clients have told me that their paid search campaigns don’t work.

My response is always the same: that’s because you’re doing it all wrong. Paid search, otherwise known as sponsored search or pay-per-click advertising, is not as simple as creating a few ads, guessing a daily budget or maximum cost-per-click. It requires research, testing, science and creativity. In other words, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you are doomed to fail and lose a lot of money into the bargain.

Over the years we’ve been lucky enough to have a client who let us “play” with their paid search campaigns. Needless to say we learned a lot – and spending money that was not ours created an educational playground that allowed us to experiment, fail, experiment again and ultimately succeed.

These days I, or should I say Creative Search Media has got paid search down to a fine art – the return on our clients’ investment speaks volumes. How do we do it? Of course, I’m not about to give a way all the secrets, tips and strategies we use to achieve success, but thought I’d share a few with our loyal reader – yes that’s you.

So here goes:

Do your research before you set up your account.

That means looking at your competition in depth, your customer demographics and discovering the words searchers use when they intend to buy. Microsoft’s AdCenter has some great free tools that will help you get started.

Choose your keywords/phrases wisely.

I prefer to use words that show a real purchasing intent as opposed to wasting clicks on the long tail. For example, the term “Yoga Mat” or “Yoga Mats” tells me people are probably looking to purchase. “Buy Yoga Mat” is even better but only if that’s a phrase that people search for.

Having chosen your keyword, create a campaign and ad that uses only that one keyword with “exact phrase match” (Google.)

When creating the ad, think not about the yoga mat but why people want to buy one – to get a better, firmer body, to improve their fitness, to look and feel better. In other words, address what your yoga mat will do for them. When writing your ad, try to use the keyword in your destination URL and capitalize the first letters. Do not send your “clickers’ to your homepage but create a landing page that directly addresses your ad’s content and keyword.

When you’ve written your ad, you’ll need to set yourself a maximum cost-per-click.
'
In other words, tell Google how much you are willing to spend for each click on that ad. Google offers a bid estimator tool that offers suggestions. My advice: take their suggestion and half it. For example if Google suggests $2.00 make your bid $1.00.

You’ll be asked if you’d like to create more ads to “split test”.

This is designed to help Google display the most clicked on ad more frequently and thus, the theory goes, help you learn which ad produces the best results. I prefer to create three identical ads and add one extra different one. That way, you keep it simple without wasting clicks.

Check your campaigns daily.

Letting your paid search campaigns languish will never work. The best ads are not the ones that get the most clicks (although clicks and quality of ad has a better chance of getting a higher rank) but the ones that convert more customers into buyers. Heck spending one dollar to get a new customer who’ll likely turn into a long-term customer can net quite a profit over the years.

Adjust your bids as needed to achieve the best click through rate and placement.

There’s a school of thought that suggests position number four and five is the optimum place to be. That’s crazy. Aim for the top spots, one, two and three.

Spending more can pay off big time.

A higher cost-per-click, especially in the long-term can pay off so don’t be frightened to bid as much as you can afford without breaking the bank.