Paid Advertising ALL IMAGES SUPPLIED BY UNSPLASH By Cory Miller Content Marketing Manager Table of Contents 1 A Very, Very Brief History of Paid Advertising 2 What is Paid Advertising? 3 Starting Simple with Search Ads 4 Getting Flashy with Display Ads 5 Becoming the Hunter with Retargeting 6 Conclusion
1 A Very, Very Brief History of Paid Advertising Paid advertising has a lot of aliases, sort of like an international spy. It goes by paid search, digital advertising, SEM, PPC, AdWords, display ads, banner ads yada, yada yada. We like the term paid advertising, so we re going to stick with that. Although digital marketing is a relatively new marketing space for small businesses, paid advertising is actually over 20 years old. In 1993, Global Network Navigator, an online information portal, was the first commercial website to sell a clickable ad. The pioneering client was the law firm Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe. I wonder how they re doing now? Within two years, GNN had Mastercard and Zima paying big bucks for ad spots. GNN was quickly acquired by a little company called AOL and the rest, as they say, is history. We re leaving out an insane amount of detail and recklessly simplifying a complicated story filled with risk taking, ingenuity and revolutionary breakthroughs. But this isn t history class, so we ll get on with it. 3
Fast forward 20 years. AdWords, Google s proprietary paid advertising platform, is annually generating over 50 billion dollars in revenue for the colorful tech giant. This accounts for over 90 percent of Google s total revenue. That was quick. 4
2 What is Paid Advertising? The easiest way to explain paid advertising is with its cost-per-click payment model. When a searcher enters a search query into a search engine (the searcher searched the sea shores for sea shells) your ad will display. The searcher sees your ad, clicks on it and is taken to your website. Your account is then charged for that click. Boom, paid advertising. While this might seem like a fast track to bankruptcy, it s not. Paid advertising is not the Wild West. There are many mechanisms in place to assure that your daily and monthly budgets are fixed. You can also be assured you re only paying for qualified leads. In other words, Joe Schmo from down the street can t click on your ad 100 times in a row and suddenly there are debt collectors ringing your phone. This is paid advertising. There are rules. 5
When used properly, paid advertising is a fantastic tool to generate new leads. However, that s not to say anyone can and should do it. Like a lot of things in life, paid advertising is best handled by a certified expert. Staying at a Holiday Inn Express last night does not qualify you to manage a paid advertising campaign. Let s look at some different branches of paid advertising, how they work and the unique benefits that each have. 6
3 Starting Simple with Search Ads Search ads are the most common form of paid advertising. These are the text ads that populate the top and right side of a search engine results page (SERP). Search ads are an effective form of advertising because of the incredibly high volume of traffic that search engines receive. Over 190 million people use Google every month, making over 100 billion searches. Not all search ads are created equal. Google, Bing and other search engines allow you to customize and enhance search ads with different formats and extensions that supply searchers with additional information. But how do search ads work on a local level? If you run a small auto body shop in Columbus, Ohio, you don t want to pay for clicks coming from northern Montana. Paid advertising platforms, like AdWords, provide you with the ability to completely customize every aspect of your ad campaign, which can be complicated. To demonstrate this, 7
let s look at a few of the most common mistakes that we see when businesses are self-managing a paid advertising campaign. Keywords: The biggest mistake that do-it-yourselfers make is in the construction of the keyword list. The fundamental idea behind a pay-per-click model is that every click should come from a potential prospect. However, if you don t understand the complexities and uses of keyword match type, then you re likely paying for clicks you don t want. Keywords have different match type choices: broad match, broad match modifier, phrase match, exact match and negative match. Each keyword in your campaign must have a set match type. Without ample experience, it s very easy to select poor keywords, assign ineffective match types and ultimately pay for clicks from non-relevant traffic. 8
Location: As we alluded to earlier, another mistake we often see is the geographic location in which a paid advertising campaign is running. Location targeting allows your ads to appear in specific geographic locations. Locations include countries, regions, cities, postal codes and the radius around a target. Additionally, you can add location exclusions to increase click rates. This will prevent your ad from running in certain parts of your targeted area. A location exclusion could be used if you re running a special promotion that isn t eligible in certain parts of your targeted area. Scheduling: To reiterate, you only want to pay for clicks that could potentially lead to a conversion. Because of this, many businesses only want ads to show during business hours. This makes sense if your main goal is to receive phone calls. By default, AdWords campaigns are set to Show ads all days and hours. If you don t want calls at 3:00 a.m. on Friday then proper ad scheduling is important. You can select specific days and specific hours to turn your campaign on and off. Additionally, you can adjust your bid (how much you re willing to pay for a click) for certain times of the day or week. If you ve noticed a low number of conversions on Mondays, you can set a bid adjustment of -20% for your max cost per click (CPC), which lowers the amount you re willing to pay for clicks on that day. 9
4 Getting Flashy with Display Ads Another branch of paid advertising is display. Display ads are the banner images you see on third-party websites. Display ads provide your paid advertising campaign with unique benefits that search ads alone cannot. Display ads appear on the Google Display Network. The Display Network is a collection of websites that show AdWords ads. The network also includes mobile sites and apps. The Display Network is quite vast. With millions of websites, news pages and blogs, the Display Network reaches 90 percent of Internet users worldwide. Websites like Weather.com, Business Insider and Food Network are all part of Google s Display Network. Display ads can take the form of text ads, image ads, rich media and video ads. Branding is one of the most powerful benefits of display ads. In fact, consumers that are exposed to display ads are 155 percent more likely to perform a branded search for that business. Display ads are the billboards of the digital world. And when exercising a cost-per-click model, you re not actually paying for the residual branding value that 10
display ads are providing your business with. Display ad clicks are also significantly cheaper than traditional search ad clicks. Display ad clicks are typically less than one dollar, while search ad cost-per-click greatly varies. Display advertising also offers new strategies for targeting potential consumers. One of the most common methods is called contextual targeting. Contextual targeting is the process that matches ads to relevant sites in the Display Network using keywords or topics. Basically, Google s system analyzes and indexes the content of each webpage to determine its central theme. Google will then use your campaign s keywords, topic selections and location targeting (among other factors) to select appropriate placements for your ads. Contextual targeting will improve the likelihood that an audience is interested in your business. For the more adventurous sort, Google will also let you choose the specific sites or pages where you want your ad to show. This is called managed placements. Unlike other targeting methods, where your ads are automatically placed on sites for you, managed placements provide you with complete control over which webpages your ads will appear on. 11
Managed placements are only recommended after you ve archived some campaign history. Perhaps you ve noticed that your ad is performing really well on a certain website. You may decide to focus more of your budget on these particular pages. Of course, the best route may be to do a little of both. With contextual targeting (automatic placements), Google will likely discover new websites and pages that are great fits for your business. You can then use managed placements to ensure that your ads are always running on the best performing sites. While display is a great addition to your paid advertising campaign, there s another strategy that takes its effectiveness one step further. Meet retargeting display advertising s big brother. 12
Banner Ads Shapes & Sizes 13
5 Becoming the Hunter with Retargeting Retargeting, also referred to as remarketing, is the strategy of specifically targeting people who have previously visited your website but didn t convert. For example, you just visited our website http://www.revlocal. com/ to download this super awesome marketing guide. Later, as you browse the Internet you may notice a few of our beautifully designed display ads popping up around you. This is retargeting. The first step in setting up a retargeting campaign is to add a retargeting tag to your website. This is a small snippet of code that s generated in your AdWords account. After the retargeting tag has been added to your website (usually in the header or footer), you re ready to start building a retargeting list. A retargeting list is built with cookies. No, seriously. Less appetizing than your grandmother s chocolate chip cookies Internet cookies are a small text files that are saved on the hard disk of a user s computer. Cookies are given a bad rap, but they re far from malicious. Cookies allow websites to store information and preferences about 14
their visitors. For example, if you visit a website with a retargeting tag it will assign you a unique visitor ID and save it as a cookie. To the website, the cookie says, Hey! I ve been here before! A website can only access information that it stores on your device. Websites cannot access your personal information or any sort of off-site browsing behavior. Websites uses cookies in different ways, but generally, cookies are used to improve user experience. For example, cookies are used to track purchases and promote related items. Websites also use cookies to provide you with more relevant content based your specified preferences location, pages visited, etc. 15
To actually flip on your retargeting campaign you need to collect at least 100 cookies over the last 30 days. In other words, you need to have 100 unique visitors to your website per month. This is quite achievable for most websites. After you ve hit this threshold you can start advertising to visitors after they leave your website. Typically, retargeting is most effective when using display ads on Google s Display Network. Retargeting has some significant advantages over search and display advertising. Approximately 98 percent of website visitors don t convert the first time they visit. Some visitors may be conducting research and are not ready to buy. Others may not be impressed with what you re offering. Regardless of their reason, it s very rare for a visitor to convert at first sight (unlike love). With this in mind, we can assume that a website visitor will continue to browse elsewhere while looking for a product of service. This is why retargeting is so important. It extends the buying atmosphere. The Grass Whacker Example: A Lesson in Retargeting Retargeting is especially valuable when a consumer s buying cycle is a bit longer. Let s look at a quick example to demonstrate the advantage of retargeting. It s late February. You re in the market for a new lawn mower before spring because of an unfortunate incident that happened last August. You ve budgeted to spend about $350.00, so you want to make sure you re buying a quality product. Before walking into a store, you conduct a sufficient amount of research to narrow down your choices. Within 15 miles of you, there are ten retailers that sell lawn mowers. While researching, you browse your way through the websites of most of these retailers comparing brands, prices and warranty plans. 16
You ve settled on particular model, the Grass Whacker 3000, which is carried by six of the ten retailers. Only one of these retailers, Big John s House of Mowers, has added a remarketing tag to its website. Because of this, Big John can stand out from the competition by directly advertising the particular model you re interested in while creating serious brand recognition. Just like that, Big John has the upper hand. Retargeting is a smart way to advertise to your website visitors because it considers their particular actions, which creates a smarter advertising strategy. While you can keep it simple and create a general retargeting list, you can also create more specific lists for people who visited a certain page or group of pages. In the example above, Big John created a retargeting list for people who visited the pages of the top five most popular mowers. Additionally, Big John created a high-value user filter for people who visited one of these five pages at least three times. 17
6 Conclusion W e ve only scratched the surface of paid advertising, but hopefully you have a better understanding of the what and the why. Paid advertising is an extremely powerful form of lead generation when it s used properly. While this marketing guide is created as an educational tool, we highly suggest that you let a professional (like us) manage your paid advertising campaign. Our team of Google and Bing certified experts live and breathe paid advertising. By managing a high volume of paid advertising accounts, we ve been able to gather industry insights that have dramatically increased the quality and effectiveness of our client s campaigns. Also, we want to point out that paid advertising is most effective when it s part of a comprehensive digital marketing strategy. We recommend that you don t put all your eggs in one basket. When it comes to digital marketing it s best to diversify your efforts. Paid advertising is certainly capable of playing the leading role, but it still needs a supporting cast to improve the quality of the entire production. 18
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