What is AdWords and Paid Search Marketing?
Pay Per Click and Paid Search Marketing are a subset of a larger category of Online Marketing called Search Engine Marketing (SEM). SEM, as you might have guessed, deals with marketing your business through search engines like Google and Bing. SEM can be broken down into 2 categories; Search Engine Optimization, the art of manipulating the organic search results to rank your website higher, and paid search marketing, where you pay for search result ranking.
Pay Per Click, a subset of Paid Search, where you pay for actual click on your ad, the other type being impression based. While PPC is my preferred paid search type and tends to perform better, both types of Paid Search have their own strengths and weaknesses depending on your marketing goals.
Search Engine Optimization and Paid Search are both equally important to your business, and you can learn more about SEO here, but we’re going to focus on the importance of Paid Search in this section.
Why You Need Paid Search Marketing
PPC and Paid Search marketing are a critical aspect of your company’s presence in the search engines. Here are some of the best reasons to use Paid search Marketing:
- Paid Search ads go live quickly, minutes to hours, allowing you to show on the first page of Google within hours of setup.
- Paid Search ads can also be changed quickly to adjust dynamic variables to your business like time of day, current inventory or even weather conditions!
- For commercial searches like ‘Buy Product X’, Paid Search listings trump Organic nearly 2:1, meaning a tangible ROI that performs great.
- Organic, free search results are not a replacement for Paid Search ads. 89% of the traffic generated by Paid Ads is not replaced when the ads are removed.
Types Of Paid Search Marketing
There are 2 main types of Paid Search ads; Pay Per Click (PPC) and Cost Per Mille (CPS/CPI).
- Pay Per Click: PPC means that you pay every time someone clicks on your ad. This is great for sales, lead generation, anything where you need a measurable Return On Investment. PPC is most often associated with searches, and because search terms indicate searcher intent (what the searcher is looking for) fairly accurately, PPC is a great way to only target qualified leads, and my Paid Search weapon of choice. The best example of this is the ads shown alongside a Google search.
- Pay Per Impression: Also known as Cost Per Mille (CPM), is impression based advertising where you pay a set price based on a thousand impressions (Mille meaning thousand). This type of advertising is best used for branding purposes, or staying at the forefront of potential buyers minds through remarketing, which targets visitors of your site with browser cookies, meaning you can show ads targeted to browsers that you know have shown interest in one or more of your products and services. The best example of CPM advertising is sponsored video ads on YouTube, although CPM ads can also be image or text based.
Paid Search Marketing Services and Platforms
Although we only mention some of the biggest Paid Search services here, the fact is that almost all websites, apps, and services have some form of paid advertising on them, and they all work on the same principals. We’re a certified Google AdWords specialist, and with Google’s AdWords being the undisputed leader in the paid search world, that means that if there’s something you’re looking for that you don’t see below, reach out anyway. If it’s online, we can market your company on it!
Google Search Marketing With AdWords
Google AdWords is the industry leader in the paid search marketing world. AdWords is superlative in every way from options to analytics to market share to its technical phone support. It’s the gold standard, and an amazing advertising tool for any business.
By combining specific keywords such as “find AdWords experts” with relevant ad copy such as “Find AdWords Experts Here”, you can drive high quality leads to your website at the exact moment they’re ready to buy.
If a picture’s worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million. We’ll use YouTube advertising to convey your brand messaging to thousands of qualified visitors through an advanced mix of demographics and keyword targeting.
We’ll help you decide if mobile is the right direction for your company, and even help optimize your site for mobile if you haven’t done so already.
We’ll help you set up your Google Maps advertising as well as helping you boost your local search results if you need it, giving you a huge boost in local sales for businesses with a fixed service area.
We’ll help translate your demographics, personas and brand alignments to targeted advertising on the Display Network, all while running the same Split Testing, Reporting and Analysis that we use to make all our paid search campaigns outperform their competitors.
Bing and yahoo Search Advertising With Microsoft’s adCenter
Microsoft’s adCenter is very similar to Google’s AdWords, the big difference being that adCenter runs on Bing and Yahoo instead of Google.
adCenter can also be less competitive than AdWords, and tends to target different demographics. Think about the difference between your typical Firefox or Chrome user vs. your typical Internet Explorer user, a huge difference.
Social Media Advertising
Social Media advertising can be hugely beneficial for brands, both from a lead perspective as well as a branding perspective.
Facebook advertising comes in both the PPC and CPM varieties and consists of both text and an image. Facebook ads also allow for a high level of targeting like by school, company or interest in addition to the mainstays like age, demographic and location.
Facebook also announced a search function recently. While this hasn’t been released yet, the ability to combine Facebook’s detailed user information and demographics targeting with keyword based search advertising could be a very powerful tool in the future.
That being said, Google+ advertising is done through the AdWords Express tool, which is a simpler version of AdWords aimed at businesses that want to advertise on Google without the hassle of learning how to use AdWords’ fairly advanced interface.
Review Site and Directory Advertising
As mentioned before, every nearly every website has some sort of paid advertising option. Listed below are some of the bigger sites, but there are hundreds more that we cover which we haven’t listed here.
There are a number of pros and cons to advertising on Yelp, and you should definitely speak to us or another paid search professional before agreeing to any contracts. We’ll be happy to provide our expert opinion in a free consultation if you’re interested.