Benefits Of Paid Search Ads For Business

Paid Search Advertising can bring many benefits to your business. Paid Search leads into various other areas of Paid Advertising such as Remarketing and Display Advertising, but is most commonly associated with Pay Per Click (PPC.) At it’s core Paid Search Advertising benefits your business because it allows you to get to get to the top of the front page of Google. Being first on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) means more people will see your ad and are far more likely to click on it.

Paid Search works well because it can instantly have you at the top of the SERPs whereas using SEO it might take you months, it might even be impossible depending on your keywords.

1. You Choose What Is Found

With SEO you can try to ensure the content you want found is found but often you’ll find yourself ranking for keyword phrases you hadn’t even thought of. With Paid Search you have total control of the Ad Copy, this means the title and meta-description of the ad will have been handcrafted by you. It also means you know exactly where you are directing anyone who clicks on that ad.

This allows you a great deal of control over the process. You create the perfect ad through practice, the one that brings you sales. It’s always trial and error but as you research over time you can craft the perfect ads that draw in quality customers. Here are some simple rules to follow for your Paid Search Ad

A title that is 50 characters or less
Tell the customer what value the product brings rather than what it is
Use actioned oriented language ‘See Why!’ ‘Download Now!’ ‘Free Trial’
Entice the customer, but never misrepresent what they’ll find on the next page

2. They Don’t Click, You Don’t Pay!

The key is in the name of Pay Per Click. Your add could feature thousands of times but if it’s not clicked you won’t be paying a penny. There are some caveats to this, obviously you have to bid for your ad space, so when it is clicked you will have to pay so never bid if you can’t afford it.

What this does mean is that you can carefully target your ads. Unlike with SEO efforts, where you want to generate as much traffic as possible you should view your Paid Search ads a qualification stage. Put in as much relevant information as possible to the ad and entice the customer in to your website. Even if they decide not to click your ad, chances are they’ve noticed your company name and website; impressions over a long period help build brand authority and recognition. Maybe you’re not their company of choice today but if they recognise your name in future you’re more likely to be.

3. Incredible Ability To Target

Using Paid Search you can target very specific groups of people on a wide variety of factors. One of the most common is geographic location. After all, if you’re a Bristol Taxi firm you don’t want people from Bristol , Massachusetts clicking on your ads! You can also target on factors such as time of day or include and exclude certain search terms. By managing your bid you can also decide where you display in the search results. Different demographics pick different results.

Sometimes it’s best to appear top of the page, but this is almost always the most expensive spot to be. Research has indicated many times the best place to be both pyschologically for the customer and financially for the advertiser is 3rd place in the paid listings on a Google or Yahoo search results page.

4. Perfectly Crafted Landing Pages

To get the most out of a Paid Search campaign you should have a whole workflow, from the ad, onto a specifically crafted Landing Page and then prompts to push the customer further into your website. Sometimes that’s viewing more products, sometimes it’s reading more articles and sometimes it’s subscribing to a newsletter. What is great about Paid Search is you have control of that whole process and you can test, rework and refine it until you’re seeing the best results possible.

The key to the perfect landing page for a Paid Search ad is that is reflects exactly what the customer expected when they clicked on the ad. It’s tempting to take a customer to your wonderfully designed homepage or your bestselling product but this is bad practice. If a customer doesn’t see what they came looking for within 7 seconds then the majority of them will navigate away from your site. Not only have you lost a potential customer but now they have a bad impression of your brand!

5. Superb For Testing…Everything!

The immediate nature of Paid Search benefits constant testing. Your ads will always be giving you easily measured feedback whether through Google Adwords or other tracking software. You will have a whole host of metrics to play with and you should use them to be constantly improving all aspects of your campaigns.

SEO and Social Media give you lots of things to measure and tweak, but nothing gives you such a wealth of information so quickly as Paid Search Advertising. It’s the perfect platform for A/B testing. Try out different landing pages, Calls To Action and Ad Copy constantly. Little tweaks are the difference between a functioning campaign and a great campaign.

What you learn from your Paid Search research can then be translated into your SEO and Social Media campaigns. Trialing new keywords is one of the most common uses of Paid Search testing because it’s a waste of time spending 3 months organically ranking for a keyword phrase that brings in no business when you could have simply paid for an ad and trialed it for a week or two.

Paid Search Advertising brings lots of benefits to a business, but it is just one tool of Digital Marketing and Paid Search alone is rarely a good choice,. When used with Content Marketing and Social Media Marketing the three become the backbone of any Digital Marketing effort.

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