Spend More Efficiently with Paid Search
With the economy in a downward spiral and marketing budgets being slashed left and right, many are adding Paid Search as an important initiative and lead generation strategy. But getting Paid Search to yield positive results can be a difficult task, and a bottomless money pit, if you don’t manage your budget efficiently.
To help better manage your Paid Search budget, it’s important to control your daily spend budgets at the campaign level and your cost-per-clicks at the keyword level. However, setting your daily spend budgets and adjusting your cost-per-clicks are not the only factors that you can control to manage your Paid Search budget more efficiently.
Let’s start with building a strong foundation for Paid Search success. Below I have outlined a few important components that will help you to start strong and find what does and does not work.
Component #1: Account Structure
Setting up your campaigns, ad groups, keywords and placements into smaller, more targeted groups allows you to write more targeted ads — therefore maximizing relevancy between the keyword, ad text and landing page — thus lowering your keywords cost-per-click and increasing its quality score.
Here are some effective ways to structure your campaigns:
- Product lines
- Your website’s navigation structure
- Brands
- Themes
- Seasonal
Component #2: Keyword Selection
The keyword selection process is the most vital part of a Paid Search campaign. The right keywords will give you the ability to target Paid Search ads specifically to those looking for related products and services, or avoid showing your ads to users who are not likely to purchase from you.
To ensure that you’re spending efficiently, it’s vital to select keywords that are relevant to your products and services. Using Long-tail keywords, synonyms and spelling variations will allow you to build extensive, relevant keyword lists that will provide a lower cost-per-click. These variations typically drive traffic that is more qualified and more likely to convert.
Component #3: Writing Targeted Ad Text
Google rewards advertisers for delivering a positive user experience. To ensure this happens, it’s imperative that you write ads that are well targeted. Placing your keywords in the headline, description line and display URL will increase your ads’ relevancy, click-thru-rate and quality score, thus lowering your cost-per-click, and allowing you to spend less to drive traffic to your website.
Component #4: Landing Page Selection
Landing page selection is tricky. When selecting your landing pages, you want to keep in mind that the landing page needs to provide a high quality advertising experience, along with being relevant to your ad text copy. The more your keywords, ad texts and landing pages are relevant to one another, the higher your quality scores will be and the lower your cost-per-click.
Component #5: Test
It’s essential to the success of your Paid Search campaign to continually test two ads per ad group. This allows you to see what ad texts or calls-to-action perform best. While testing, watch, review and refine your ads when your strategies are not working. It’s important to re-allocate your budget towards areas of your campaign that provide the best ROI.
In closing, being more efficient with your Paid Search budget will allow you to generate more traffic at lower costs. In addition, if you’re optimizing your campaign around providing users with a quality experience, you’re likely to spend your budget more efficiently — while increasing your quality scores and lowering your overall costs.
