Search and Shopping campaigns, most commonly deployed on Google Ads and known as Paid Search, are the cornerstone and popular work-horses of the paid advertising world. They are the go-to campaign types for the vast majority of advertisers who wish to put their product or service in-front of someone who is searching for it with paid ads.
Search campaigns are most commonly used for lead generation, whereas Shopping is exclusively for ecommerce retailers of physical goods. Search or Shopping campaigns are usually paired with Remarketing campaigns in order to catch both immediate and longer-term value.
The main advantage that paid search has over other PPC campaign types is that it most often has immediate purchasing or decision-making intent with the traffic it generates, since a user has actively searched for the product or service.
We understand how to connect your business with real-time online demand for your product or service. Paid search is in our company’s DNA – literally! At WSI Paid Search, as a paid search agency we have an incredible depth of experience with this foundational element of paid advertising.
Book a free, no-obligation paid advertising audit or consultation with our paid search experts today.
Paid search is no longer just about keywords. It’s about matching your keywords to your target persona at the right moment. Just imagine if you were a B2B solar panel company, exclusively servicing the construction industry. No-one searches, ‘solar panels for construction company’, so instead you can bid on ‘solar company’ as a much broader and popular keyword, but ensure with B2B detailed demographic targeting that only those who search for this phrase AND work in the construction industry see your ad.
Google Ads used to be known as AdWords until 2018. The old branding was literally about ads and words in relation to paid search campaigns, whereas now, the ‘words’, referring to keywords, are almost secondary to the additional detailed targeting layers available to you. Hence – Google rebranded to reflect this by dropping ‘word’ from it’s name!
Google Ads campaigns typically reach performance within 90 days. Whilst the effects of Google Ads are immediate (you’ll see your ads, you’ll get traffic, you’ll get conversions), it takes time to optimise and refine them to reach peak performance. Consider all the factors at play such as target audiences, keywords, ad creative, landing pages, calls to action, devices, time of day, day of the week, target gender, target income-level, target marital status and much more; they all have different performance characteristics and the process of optimisation is all about building data and honing in on your sweet spots.
Google Ads campaigns are very forecastable, meaning it’s possible to research the potential for a campaign’s reach. It is also possible to research the potential cost of that reach. Then you simply work out your minimum viable budget, which refers to how much you have to spend to reach a meaningful amount of your total potential audience. Alternatively, you might want to be more aggressive and budget for a larger portion of the potential audience sooner.
It is quite probable that even with the best expertise in the world, elements of your strategy will be ‘wrong’, and that’s OK, as long as you know how to monitor and tweak things appropriately to get maximum ad dollars in the right place.
If you get it completely wrong, catch it before it gets out of hand and change direction, and be thankful for the learning (after all, knowing what not to do is often as valuable as knowing what to do).
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