HOW DOES PAID SEARCH ADVERTISING WORK?
Paid Search Advertising, also called Pay-Per-Click or PPC, is one of the best ways for your business, product, or service to be consistently shown by a search engine (in this case Google) when an individual is looking for something specific. It also allows for consistent traffic to your website from relevant search results; the beauty is that the people are already looking for what your business has to offer.
For those that are not very familiar with Google’s AdWords, it is a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) service that allows advertisers to create ads on a platform, manage ads, target the right people (those interested in your product or service), select a budget that works, and only pay for what is working. Unlike traditional advertising, a lot of dollars are spent and wasted upfront without knowing what is and what isn’t working. Digital advertising, in this case, Paid Search Advertising is flexible and measurable.
1. GOOGLE ADWORDS IS FLEXIBLE & MEASURABLE
While many people are stuck on using what they have always used in the past, such as print advertising or TV advertising, those channels are not nearly as flexible and measurable as digital advertising. Digital Advertising, more specifically, Paid Search advertising is extremely measurable and flexible.
PPC is one of the most measure-friendly channels of advertising, giving you instant insight into which advertising strategies are working and which are not, advertisers can track this through an array of metrics that are available.
Flexibility is at the heart of PPC advertising. It gives advertisers many different customizable options that suit a business’s particular needs in many different ways.
Here are some of the options that are available to you through Google AdWords:
- Keywords & Match Types: Keywords are what drive Paid Search Advertising. Knowing your business and your business’ audience is crucial for successful Paid Search Advertising. Keywords are what people are searching for, and you can bid on certain keywords that work for your business. Different Match Types allow you to narrow down and define what people are looking for so that it is more relevant with what your business has to offer.
- For example: If you own an ice cream shop, you can set up a Broad Match Keyword for “Ice Cream” – this would tell Google to show your ads for any search that contains the keyword “Ice Cream”; but if you have an ice cream shop in California you would want to set up an Exact Keyword Match Type for “California Ice Cream” – this would tell Google to show your ads only to people searching for “California Ice Cream”, making it relevant for your business.
- Ad Extensions: Extensions enable advertisers to showcase more information about what the business being advertised has to offer. Extensions also expand the ad, making it take up more space on a screen, which improves the ads impressions and visibility. Ad Extensions allow for information such as call buttons, location information, additional site-links, additional text, and more. There is no extra cost when using Ad Extensions; the same Cost-Per-Click applies to clicks on the ads with Ad Extensions.
- Narrow Down & Define Your Audience: Knowing your audience plays a significant role with Paid Search Advertising. In Google AdWords, you can select a location, time of day, language, browser, and device type.
2. IMMEDIATE TRAFFIC TO WEBSITE
Setting up a Google AdWords account is no rocket science if the advertiser knows how to use the platform. With the right knowledge, and the advertiser can create an advertising campaign for the business being advertised, and can get on the first page of the search results (given that they know what they are doing). New businesses and websites that have little or no exposure greatly benefit from this. Not only are they advertising their products or services online, and to the right audience, but they are also creating brand awareness for free. Remember, Google only charges you for the times that your ads are clicked, not for a number of times it is shown – so you are indeed getting free advertising and immediate traffic to your site.
3. CONTROL OF ADVERTISING BUDGET AT ALL TIMES
One of the best features of digital advertising, including PPC, is that the advertiser is in full control of the amount of money that gets spent, at all times. In Google AdWords you can set a maximum daily budget for each one of your campaigns, so you can focus your dollars on what makes more sense. You can also set maximum bids for keywords, so you only spend what you’re willing to spend for any certain keyword.
This enables advertisers to budget and plan accordingly without ever going over budget. Keep in mind that as ad spend begins to decrease, so will the number of times your ads get served, and therefore lower traffic to your business’ site.
If your business, for whatever reason, needs to increase leads or sales drastically for a certain period, you can also increase your budget, and this will aid as your ads will be served more, and more qualified traffic will land on your site, therefore bringing in more conversions.
Learn and understand everything about your business’ core target audience.
4. GET NEW INSIGHTS ABOUT YOUR MARKET
Knowing and understanding your business’ target audience is as important as the services you have to offer, one simply does not work without the other, so why would you spend time creating a product when you’re not even sure who is going to want/need it, or if they even will at all?
Knowing and understanding who your target audience will make dealing, and find out what your customers want a lot easier. This is not an easy task, but it had become a lot easier than it was in earlier years when businesses asked their customers to fill out questionaries and participate in interviews, but this was only a handful of people, and sometimes the results were limited and skewed.
Learning customer habits, lead cycles, and more about your audience is difficult, though, Google AdWords gathers an enormous amount of data about your audience and their habits on a daily basis. All of the information garnered by Google AdWords such as the keywords your ads are being triggered by most, the type of device, times of day, location and other habits can be notably invaluable for advertisers and business owners.
5. GET IN FRONT OF MILLIONS OF POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS
Millions of people around the globe use Google to search for things that interest them, or things that they are looking for on a daily basis. Think about the last time you were looking for something, and the first thing that came to mind was to perform a Google search.
Google now processes over 40,000 search queries every second, you can “see” them here – this number translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day, and over 1.2 trillion searches per year globally, and there are no signs of these figures slowing down.
Take a look at the graph below to see how Google search queries have grown over the years.
