4 Tips for Creating a Successful Paid Search Campaign

The Paid Search Dilemma

Paid advertising can generate a high ROI when done properly. Get it wrong, however, and it can quickly become an expensive waste of time. Paid search is yet another valuable skill that any small business owner needs to master if they want to grow their online business.

There are three fundamental problems that small businesses all experience when it comes to cracking the paid search dilemma:

• Limited Budget – Although advertising may be viewed as a necessary expense, there is also a limit to how much any business can afford to spend. Sometimes that budget may be exceeded before sufficient progress has been made
• Limited Staff – If your business is either a sole proprietorship or a small family company, everyone is incredibly busy. Assigning even one person to concentrate on developing your paid search strategy can be difficult.
• Limited Time – This issue is magnified by the staff problem mentioned above. The lack of staff means there is a lack of time to devote the necessary research. This is your typical small business dilemma; you need the ads to grow the business. You need the time to perfect the ads. Without one, the other will never happen.

4 Tips for a Successful Paid Search Campaign

At Arcalea, we take great pride in being able to improve and assist our readers’ businesses. Here are some simple concepts you can implement which will hopefully improve your clickthrough rate, and transform that marketing spend into an increased bottom line.

1. Be Focused And Create A Structure With Your Advertising – Although you may sell products that are all interlinked, it is important to differentiate each group of products into a separate ad structure.

Let’s imagine you own a sports store, for instance. The ads for your swimming products should be totally different than those for the baseball section for example. When it comes to creating your ads, they need to be laser focused and targeted on a very specific niche. This isn’t the equivalent of casting a large fishing net and hoping; you need to attract the attention of your ideal customer and reel them in quickly.

2. Identify Your Best Keywords – This may sound obvious, but many people fail to pay attention to this critical step. A good keyword has two components, firstly, it gets a high clickthrough rate, and secondly, those clicks convert into sales. You need to be constantly evaluating which of your keywords are generating the most income, and then increase your spend and focus on those. See if you can come up with some alternatives with a similar meaning. This is the equivalent of investing your budget on proven winners, after all, if you know that spending $1 on a pay per search term generates $2 profit, then it makes sense to spend $100 to make $200.

3. Identify And Build Your Negative Keywords – Let’s stay with our sports store analogy, and let’s imagine that we don’t sell any golf equipment. If someone clicks on our ads after searching for golf clubs, then we waste money and achieve nothing. This could become a huge drain on your resources and budget, which is why it is crucial that you stop the problem dead in its tracks. You will never be able to eliminate all the negative phrases, especially at the start of your campaign. But as things develop, you need to refine and edit your negative list to minimise the waste. It is important to understand that this will be an ongoing process, that will require regular attention.

4. Don’t Let Your Ads Become Stale – The number one job of any advert is to grab the reader’s attention and encourage them to click on it. One of the hardest things to do with any ad campaign is to keep editing and changing your advert. Testing, tweaking and trying to improve it. Different words will catch the eye of different people, so never fall into the trap of being satisfied with your advert, as, in a lot of cases, you will be leaving money on the table.

Additional Resources

Paid ads have become a staple of online marketing. In this new realm, you’ll need to do your research to make sure you’re not spending above your budgets, and that you’re targeting the right people with the right keywords. For a single person, this can quickly become overwhelming. Consider hiring an expert agency that will help you manage your paid advertising. Then you can worry less about what to do, and focus more on improving your products and services.

To find out 5 ways your business can benefit from PPC, click our article here.
To learn about some digital marketing trends that we’ll see in 2017, click our article here.

To read our other blog posts, visit Arcalea’s Blog today.