As the landscape of marketing becomes ever more dominated by digital ad, starting your very first paid search campaign can also open doors to a new level of visibility and audience targeting and business growth. Technically called Pay-Per-Click advertising, paid search has emerged into one of the most popular ways for businesses to appear on the headspace of search results based on specifically selected keywords their potential customers use in performing online searches. The method is strategic and cost-effective if executed correctly.
Get taken through the basics of launching your first paid search campaign, ensuring you get the most out of your budget and maximize your return on investment. As a responsible advertising agency in Dubai, GCC Marketing has been able to help all sizes and shapes of businesses run successful paid search campaigns; here is what we know we are sharing with you for great results.
Table of Contents
Understanding Paid Search Campaigns
Paid search advertising operates on a very simple yet powerful idea: businesses bid on specific terms relevant to their offerings, and when a user searches for those terms, the ads appear at the top of the search results for a given term. It’s simply selecting the most suitable keywords, writing compelling ad copy, and always keeping an eye and improving your ads.
Precipitating this process must be a clear campaign goal: you may need to get people visiting your website, or increasing leads and product sales. That should help you determine the course of your strategy and measure how successful your campaign is.
Step 1: Define Your Campaign Goals
The basis of any successful paid search campaign is clearly defined goals. This is the only way to measure the effect of effort. You can start with the obvious objectives such as traffic, conversion, or brand awareness in your first campaign. Having SMART objectives means you can track the performance of your campaign and therefore make a very informed decision.
For example, if it coincidentally is a launching new company that does paid search, you may set a goal to increase the website traffic by 20 percent within the next three months. This is very realistic yet measurable because for each click of your advertisements visiting your website you will be able to track.
Step 2: Keyword Research
Keyword research is one of the most crucial steps while launching a paid search campaign. Directly what you target by words and phrases will influence at what times and places your ads appear, so it should be chosen appropriately to reach your target audience. For doing this, Google Keyword Planner or third party keyword research tools can be used.
You’ll target high-intent keywords that are relevant to the products or services you have. For instance, if you run a digital marketing agency in Dubai, you will surely love to target the terms “digital marketing services Dubai,” “best marketing agency in Dubai,” or “social media management companies Dubai.” Long-tail and specific phrases tend to have higher conversion rates since they relate to specific search intentions from users.
Then, do not miss to look into the number of searches and competitors bidding on each term. Balance popular search terms with less competitive keywords so that your ads are reaching the people you need without overpaying in the most competitive terms.
Step 3: How to Set Your Budget and Bidding Strategy
Paid search operates on the basis of some form of bidding. This implies a competition with other businesses to get into that ad space on the basis of the keywords you’ve chosen. Your budget dictates how much you’re willing to pay per click, but it also determines how aggressively you are competing for that next click.
This should be enough, for the new man, to start from a daily budget, correlated with the overall marketing spend. You may raise your budget over time as you grow, and have a flexible bidding strategy based on the performance of campaigns.
There are basically two types of bids: bid strategies, which are either manual or automated bidding. In the former, you are allowed total control over how much to bid on every keyword, but with the latter, it is the search engine that adjusts your bid to meet particular goals, like maximizing clicks or conversions. Select the one that best fits your objectives as it would help in optimizing ad spend.
Step 4: Copywriting Better Ad Copy
Ad copy is generally the first contact that your customers will have with your business, so ad copy need to be clear and relevant to what your potential customer might be searching for; namely a good headline description and a URL. Each ad has to fit together to capture the viewer’s eye in order to persuade the user to click the ad.
A good ad should by nature entail at least a keyword, value proposition, and preferably, a strong call to action. To give you an example, you can consider your digital marketing services where your ad copy may look something like this:
“Boost Your Business with Expert Digital Marketing. Get a free consultation today by calling our agency.”
The heading should attract the audience, but simultaneously align to a question typed in by a visitor. The more the description will describe in detail, it should indicate what advantage is achieved through your company services, including why you are more advantageous than the competition. Be sure that your call-to-action is bright and imperative, thus letting the visitor go further: with either visiting the site or contacting your team, of course.
Step 5 Targeted Landing Pages
The landing page targeted should be where the user is taken once he clicks your ad based on what the ad copy offered him. A good landing page is the one that converts visitors into customers. To this end, a landing page should be optimized for both desktop and mobile sites, with clear navigation, and powerful call to action.
Your landing page must also resonate with the context of the exact search query. Therefore, if your ad word boasts “social media management services,” the landing page should include details about the services, customer testimonials, and make it easy for users to contact you.
That is, a responsive design should also make sure landing pages are fast and easy to navigate. A slow or cluttered landing page can indeed lead to such high bounce rates among the users who leave without taking an action-a phenomenon that affects your overall campaign performance.
Step 6: Conversion Tracking Set Up
Measuring the performance of your paid search campaign requires conversion tracking: knowing what is happening with users, whether they fill a contact form or buy something. Conversion tracking helps you understand which keywords, ads, and landing pages are working for you and perhaps enables you to optimize your campaign to work even better.
Most paid search platforms, such as Google Ads, will offer conversion tracking tools that you can install on your account. It lets you monitor key actions that users take after clicking on your ad by adding little code to your website.
Step 7: Run and Optimize Your Campaign
However, no paid search campaign ever turns too successful without running it continuously and optimizing every once in a while. Periodical review has to be done to ascertain that you are getting the maximum out of your ad spend and that high-quality traffic is being generated to the website.
Such metrics as CTR, CPC, conversion rate, and ROAS one uses in order to find how the campaign is going. When you find weak keywords or weak ads you check how a modifying of a bidding strategy or the test of new ad copy or the tweaking of landing pages could help.
Paid search is a dynamic activity, to be frank with you, and whatever works today may just have to be tweaked tomorrow. But if you’re keeping a constant track of your campaign and making a data-driven decision, then you could be enhancing over time.
Step 8: Ad Extensions
Ad extensions are a method of adding extra details you can append to your ad and make it look more appealing and informative. The extension might be able to add such information as your company’s phone number, some addresses, or special deals for specific items. All these can enhance the visibility of your ad and improve the click through rate.
For example, if you are giving an offer of some special discount on digital marketing for a certain period, the extension of promotion can very quickly convey the said offer within your advertisement, which will attract users to come along and get the deal.
One such extension would add that depth to Google Ads, which means sitelink extensions and callout extensions, which are, for example, structured snippets that help you highlight different aspects of your business. Adding those to the ad will add a little more depth and will thereby enhance the performance of your ads; hence, it is one more reason for users to click.
FAQs About Setting Up a Paid Search Campaign
Is there a minimum budget to start a paid search campaign?
No, and the ideal budget should be small enough to not break the bank but big enough to show how effectively it performs. It’s usually good to grow the budget based on performance rather than just assuming what is good enough. Regular monitoring of a campaign will also ensure your spend ties up the right way with achieving your goals.
How soon will I start to see results from a paid search campaign?
For paid searches, you don’t wait until you have built and perfected your campaign; the campaigns go live with traffic generation almost immediately, but it takes weeks or months to really optimize. Monitoring and optimization continues once you are trying to improve over weeks or months.
What are the best ways for me to choose my keywords for my campaign?
Choosing the right keywords will always require some research on what kind of terms your target audience would use to look for your service. Tools like Google Keyword Planner also enable finding related, high-intent keywords.
Manual vs. Automated Bidding What’s the difference between manual and automated bidding?
Manual bidding offers you full control over the amount of money you are willing to spend on every click, whereas automated bidding changes the auction based on specific goals such as clicks or conversions. The best strategy really depends on your campaign objectives.
How do I improve the conversion rate for my campaigns?
Conversion is improved through ad copy, landing pages, and targeting aimed at the right audience, making the landing page suitable for a call-to-action.
With these steps and maintaining the focus on optimization, you will end up creating a very successful paid search campaign that takes you drive quality traffic, which could bring desirable business results. GCC Marketing is a top advertising agency in Dubai offering specific solutions to businesses looking forward to exceling at paid search and other types of digital advertising.
