Paid search, or PPC, is advertising on search engines based on users searches. The idea is for your advert to be displayed when a relevant search is carried out. In this case, relevance is determined by the intent of the search matching your requirements, usually meaning their search indicates they’d be in need or are already actively looking for the product or service offered, regardless of if they know your brand or not. 

Why is it important?

The point of this channel is a given; paid search is a direct, no-nonsense means of generating more leads, increasing sales and increasing your brand awareness quickly. The costs may be higher than other methods, but the customers intent can be made more relevant, and the stream of leads and sales from this channel can be much more reliable than others. 

Just under 75% of searches take place on google and 8% on Bing, so we’ll focus primarily on these two. Bing comes with the added benefit of sharing many, if not all, of the same features as Google Ads. It’s actually possible to create your campaigns for google, export them and import them into Bing. 

How to set up your campaigns.

Here we’re going to focus on text ads as they require the most edits and strategy but can be the cheapest and most effective. For most small businesses, this is where you’d start; however, if your product is particularly visually captivating then Image ads and PLA ads should be your next port of call once you have the time and budget to support them.

As a rule of thumb, you’d create one campaign for each product or service you provide and within those campaigns, you’d have ad groups based on the different variations or possible relevant searches. 

E.g. ‘Orange Lantern’ and ‘Sunset orange Lantern’ could be separate ad groups within the same ‘Lantern’ campaign. 

Within these ad groups are keywords, these are the search terms that you require to be in a search query to trigger your ad. There are four types and a good starting point for small businesses is to have three or so variations of the same basic keyword in each ad group, in each format. 

Keywords can be Broad match, Exact match and Phrase match.

• Broad match keywords are in the following form: ‘Green Lantern’. Each word must be within the query searched; however they can appear in any order, and words can be replaced with others with similar meaning. This can be unwieldy, and we’d suggest staying away from this type, instead, making use of broad match modified which would appear in this format: ‘+Green +Lantern’. This type of keyword allows you to achieve the same thing as a broad match but in a more controlled manner. The words can appear in any order, which still can be a little unpredictable. However, the words chosen must be present. 

• Exact match keywords require that the search query matches the keyword exactly or a close variation, for example, a plural or a slight misspelling. The format for these keywords: [Blue Lantern].

• Phrase match keywords appear in the format: “Grey Lantern”. The words within the speech marks must appear together in this form within the search query. It’s a way of filtering queries where the order of the words can change the meaning and intent.

It’s important to use negative keywords to stop your ad from displaying for what you would deem irrelevant searches. Similarly to your regular keywords, they can be exact, phrase or broad match negative keywords. These should be used extensively whenever you use broad or broad match modified keywords. You can negative anything from competitor names to words that change the intent of the search, such as ‘Free’.

Audiences are an excellent way of defining who you want your ads to show for; by selecting a specific group, you can also cut down your costs as your not competing for every query, just those made by the relevant people. You can specify and audience using a client email list or using google pixels to identify previous website visitors or people who have reached specific pages of your site. 

Audiences allow you to remarket to previous buyers or website visitors who, in theory, are more likely to be interested in your products, cheaper per click and more likely to convert.

If your product or service is device-specific, you can target your ads at users on a specific device or take out the targeting on a device. This can help to make your ads super-relevant, and showing in the right place can ultimately cut costs as you cut wasted clicks. 

Another means of using device targeting is when you’ve already kicked off your campaigns and have noticed that conversions or clicks on a specific type of device is particularly costs and hurting your overall margins. It would be a good idea to remove the costly device to maximise your budget and resources. 

Location targeting is a clear option for any small business that only wishes to service a specific region, area, country or continent. The idea is to only show your ads for relevant queries made within your chosen locations. This again maximises your spend on relevant searches and can be made super targeted. It’s always a good idea to minimise waste by making your ads targeted.

Ensure you add conversion pixels to your account. This means adding the Google pixel code to the page that identifies a conversion or the button or action. You can then integrate further to give values to conversions. The purpose of this is to allow you to benefit from Conversion tracking. As a small business, the most important thing with Paid Search is to maximise your return on investment and the only way to ensure your spending on the right campaigns and keywords is to monitor the conversion rate each is providing and the costs associated. This is an easy way to identify particularly fruitful campaigns and keywords in which you can double down and increase your budget whilst scaling back on less lucrative ones. 

The Ads

Expanded text Ads

As of January 2017, this format replaced traditional text ads in order to make them more mobile-friendly. They consist of two headline fields, two description fields and a display URL which is based on the URL you’ll be sending leads to and two optional vanity paths. 

PLA ads

PLA’s or ‘Product Listing Ads’ are Google Shopping Ads. These ads appear on the left or at the top of Google search pages. They feature a product image and are focused on individual products instead of keywords. 

Image Ads

These are ‘display network’ ads. Google ads that appear on a variety of websites that have opted in to display ads on them. There are set dimensions that you will have to create image ads for and this will allow your image ads to show in a variety of positions on sites. 

Ad extensions

These aren’t a type of Ad. They are extras that can be added to ads in order to make them perform better, offer more information and interest searchers more. These can be:

• Site Link extensions allow you to highlight relevant links to other pages or products on your site. Keep this relevant by linking to similar products or service and refraining from generic site links. The key here is to maximise the chances of providing people with what exactly it is they want. 

• Location extensions. These allow you to display the location in which you are trading which can help to capitalise on local searchers and people whose needs relate to proximity. 

• Call extensions display your chosen contact number. On mobile devices, which many searches take place on, users are able to select the call extension, making the call directly from the Ad itself. 

• Consumer Rating extensions allow searchers to see what other past customers think of your business. This is a great way to capitalise on great reviews and influence a searchers decision in your favour.

As with many things for small businesses, including startups, Paid Search (or PPC) is even more important and using paid search in the right way can make or break your marketing strategy. 

Paid search has the potential to grow your business exponentially and doesn’t necessarily have to cost you more than other channels. The benefits of being able to predict your revenue from PPC can be significant for a small business in allowing you to plan other activities with peace of mind. 

With that said, give it a go and let us know how you get on.

As always, Happy Small Business Marketing!

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