When you start building your brand online, it can be difficult to rely entirely on your owned channels, such as your blog and Facebook page or email contact list, to generate enough visitors and leads for your business. That’s why many marketers choose to supplement their own media promotions with paid advertising. Such as pay-per-click (PPC) ads, affiliate ads, and native advertising.
The problem with paid ads is that they can be interruptive and annoying. Which means they become expensive, really fast.
Why, because people don’t go online to see ads, but they go to find the information they are seeking. And they just ignore your ads unless they are appealing, relevant, and valuable to them.
But, that doesn’t mean that paid advertising is not worth spending your marketing money. It would help you generate faster and additional traffic, leads, and conversions on your website.
In this section, we’ll go over ways you can make your pay-per-click (PPC) ads less annoying and more enticing.
Doing this will lead to an increase in clicks and drive relevant traffic to your website.
When to Use Paid Advertising?
No one wants to pay for something which can be achieved without paying money.
But, when you want to increase your sales, the best option is to go for Paid Advertising.
Though there are various other reasons for doing paid advertising:
Increase Brand Awareness
Paid advertising is the best way to quickly show your ads to a large number of audience. This makes your brand visible and creates brand awareness.
Brand Recall
You can also use paid advertising to create brand recall. The ads are shown to people who have been to your store or website long back. And with the display ads, they quickly recall your brand.
Increase Traffic or Footfall
With paid advertising and promoting a value proposition businesses increase traffic on their websites and footfall in their retail stores.
Generate More Qualified Leads
PPC ads help small businesses bring in more leads to their website. More than that, the leads that are coming to your site from your PPC ads are more relevant.
With PPC ads, you are strategically targeting consumers who are most likely to be interested in the product you sell. This means that the traffic you drive to your site from these ads is more qualified.
Measure Results
You can clearly measure every aspect of your PPC ad campaigns including the number of clicks.
You can also measure the cost per click, and how many sales are coming from these clicks.
This helps you make better use of your ad budget and find ways to improve your results over time.
Improve Brand Recognition
PPC ads on Google can also help your business improve brand awareness over time. Not every search engine user is going to click on your ad when it appears in the search engine results.
However, the more often they search for related industry keywords, the more often they will be exposed to your brand name and site link.
This helps improve brand recognition and may result in a later sale.
Great for Local Search
Many small businesses are targeting customers that are in close proximity to their location. The good news is that paid search advertising is a great way to target local traffic.
When consumers use their mobile devices to search for stores nearby, they will see your PPC ads. And be able to click on them for directions to your location.
There is also a call option on mobile ads that allow the user to call you right from the ad.
Specific Targeting
Paid campaigns allow you to set your target. You can target your ads based on hobbies, geography, device type, gender, language, etc. Which yields better results than doing ads without targeting the right people.
Retargeting
Retargeting ads are shown to people who have visited your website without taking action on your website.
So, if someone visits your e-commerce website, adds a few items to their cart, and then leaves, you can show them retargeting ads. Retargeting ads can reach users across platforms.
Retargeting display ads will show up when the user visits another website.
They can also be shown retargeting ads in searches or on social media. Retargeting ads can drive some serious benefits for businesses:
- Conversion rates increase with more retargeting ad impressions, so people are more likely to convert with more retargeting ad views.
- One study found that retargeting ads led to a 1046 percent increase in branded search and a 726 percent lift in site visits.
Budget-friendly
Though it may seem counter-intuitive because you are paying per ad click, paid search advertising can actually be budget-friendly.
This makes it an ideal tactic for small businesses that are working with a limited budget.
Since you are able to target specific types of consumers and measure every aspect of your campaign along the way, there are plenty of ways to optimize your budget and boost ROI.
You can set budget caps, and the search engines will not spend more than you tell them to.
Which are the Mediums for Paid Advertising?
The best way to use paid advertising is to drive traffic to a page that has a specific call-to-action.
Such as subscribing to your blog, downloading an ebook, or signing up for a free trial, buying some product, or registering for some event, etc.
But, of course, you don’t want to just pay for traffic, you want to pay for traffic that turns into subscribers and leads.
What you don’t want to do is drive traffic from ads to your home page where there’s no specific call-to-action.
Or the visitor doesn’t know what he is supposed to do next.
You need them to take some action on your website because you are paying somebody to make them visit your website.
How to Do Paid Search Advertising Effectively?
We have got you covered, here are some best practices:
Keyword Research
Do keyword research to understand which terms to bid on and understand your cost per click (CPC).
You can use the keyword planner tool built-in Google Ads interface for keyword research.
And also see how much clicks those keywords get in a month, week, and year.
Audience Targeting
Always use targeting so your ads get served to the most relevant audience. You can target by behavior, location, device type, and more.
For example, if you’re a mobile food delivery app located in New Delhi, you really don’t need to be targeting desktop users, or those outside of New Delhi or nearby places, because you might not service those customer orders.
Set up a Brand Name Campaign
For example, we would bid on “Digitoly” so that if someone searches for that term, we’re displayed in the ad section as well as in organic search results.
Though it is not necessary, if your competition is using your brand name as a keyword in their campaign you might lose the first position in the Search engine result pages, so as a caution setting up brand name campaign is a good idea.
You don’t need to bid on competitors’ brand names, it’s not a sustainable or cost-effective strategy.
Instead, focus on more broad match keyword combinations to get more clicks and traffic from your ads.
Bid on Keywords Related to Your Brand
For example, Digitoly might bid on the term “Digital Marketing Services” or “Digital Marketing Consultancy” or “Digital Marketing Training” which are closely associated with our brand.
Optimize Ads for Better Quality Score
Quality score is important because they affect your bidding amount, position on the search engine result pages, and CTR as well.
By linking your ads with relevant landing pages you can improve your quality score and get better ROI on your ad spends.
If your ad points to a page that a search engine doesn’t think is actually related to the ad, your ad won’t get served up.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search Engine Marketing (SEM), or paid search, is one of the biggest areas of paid marketing, and it refers to paying for search terms people are entering into search engines such as Google and Bing with what are known as “bids”.
Depending on your bid versus others bidding on the same keyword phrase, your ad will show up above organic search results for a set amount of time until you exhaust that ad’s budget, or you have given a specific timeline for the ads to be shown in those search results.
For example, if you were to bid on the keyword “digital marketing courses”, your ad would appear on the page displaying search results for that keyword. (See the above example of ads being shown on keyword “Digital Marketing Courses”)
Each search engine has its own version of paid search, including Google Ads, Bing Ads, etc.
Display Advertising – A form of Paid Advertising
Display advertising often referred to as banner ads, is when you pay for ad space on third-party sites.
Think about a media website you’ve visited recently — often, there will be ads across the top, on the right-hand side, and even bottom of their web pages.
Before you use this form of advertising, ask yourself: when was the last time you clicked on a display ad?
For many of us, the answer is “never” because these ads have a bad reputation as being distracting, disruptive, and unrelated to anything you might be interested in.
While it’s the least effective of the different types of digital advertising if you do choose to use display advertising, make sure you’re using proper targeting so that your ads are getting served to the right people in the right place.
Here are some display PPC tips you’ll want to keep in mind:
Create A “Blacklist” of Site Types You Do Not Want Your Ads Appearing On
You don’t want your brand on sites that don’t mesh with your content or brand, such as error pages or pages containing profane language or images.
Advertisers such as Google Display Network allow you to do this in the account settings section.
Always Use Images
A picture is worth a thousand words and is true in display advertising, text-only display ads will get completely lost in the content, but if you use good and meaningful images with right Call-to-Action in your ads, you will get much better results.
Test Your Ad Copy
Create several ads with different copies, and link them all to the same landing page. Drive the traffic to that landing page.
After a day of running, see which ad is performing best, you can see it in the campaign performance reports and turn the others off.
This way you will not only get good leads but also save your marketing money.
Native Social Advertising
Native advertising refers to ads that look like they are part of the platform they are on.
You may have seen promoted posts in your Facebook news feed, sponsored updates on LinkedIn or perhaps promoted tweets on Twitter.
They look like a normal update in the user’s feed but are marked as “sponsored” or “promoted” so users know it’s an advertisement.
When you combine native advertising with good targeting, which many platforms such as Facebook, Google, you can get a great bang for your buck.
This is because you are able to serve relevant content to the right audience.
On Facebook, for example, if you are a marketing agency that works with startups, you could target by location, interests, and job title to show a relevant piece of content to them.
Or, if you’re an e-commerce platform for fashion clothes and accessories, you could target by locations you ship to, gender, age, and what they’ve “liked” previously online.
Similarly, native advertising can be done on websites, for example, see outbrain.com or Taboola.com they offer native advertising, and the ads are shown in such a way that they appear to be part of the content.
Which is more likely to be clicked by the visitors who are interested in that type of content.
Here are some best practices for social advertising:
Twitter Paid Advertising
- Use the Right Type of Ad for Your Goal. You can use ads that are meant for improving engagement. Such as retweets and favorites, website clicks or conversions, app installs, followers, or even leads. If you want to generate leads, use the website click ad. If you want to get blog subscribers, consider using Twitter lead generation ads. It collects the subscriber’s email address, name and twitter handle with just a click.
- Always use images. Ads that use images perform 3x better than text-based ones. So, it is a good idea to use images in the ads.
- No hashtags in paid tweets. Each link you add reduces the click-through rate on the website URL you’re actually trying to drive users towards. Because, people click on the hashtags instead of the CTA link, so avoiding hashtags in paid ads would save you money and bring you, direct customers, without distracting them.
Facebook Paid Advertising
- Create a targeted audience for every ad placement. You might reach fewer people, but targeting by demographics, interests, and location can help you increase engagement because your content will be more relevant to a larger portion of your audience. You can also use the lookalike audience feature to further target the audience with the help of the Facebook AI data which would be similar to your target audience.
- Make Every Ad Element Work in Sync: The headline, description, images, videos, and CTA button all are very important to generate a click on the ad, so it all needs to be well thought out, and well placed to get best results.
- Choose what medium your ad is displayed on: If the conversion is your goal, consider limiting ads to just the newsfeed. If you have a longer-form on your landing page, you may want to limit it to desktop-only. Because the users on mobile devices find it difficult to fill up the long forms. Also if your ad is about gated content like the ebook download keep it to desktop because many users don’t download the ebook on their mobile devices, especially iPhone users.
LinkedIn Paid Advertising
LinkedIn is a great platform for B2B sales. So if you’re selling products or services to another company, consider utilizing LinkedIn Ads for high-value clicks.
- Sponsored Updates: Use video or images in your updates for better clicks. Content with videos and images tend to perform better than those without.
- Use 60 Characters or Less: The description text on LinkedIn Ads should be 60 characters or less. Because more characters are cut off the page and the viewers can’t read that.
- Target to the Right Audience: With LinkedIn, you can get the most granular with your targeting out of all the social media platforms available, so take your time to find the right audience. You can even target employees at specific companies. So if you have a targeted campaign aimed at a few enterprises in a certain industry this might be a great way to drive the right traffic back to your website and generate meaningful leads.
Retargeting with Paid Advertising
Once you’ve got a fair amount of traffic and built up your database with leads, you can even use paid advertising to move those leads towards taking further actions and becoming customers.
This form of advertising is known as paid retargeting, where you retarget your existing leads.
Retargeting Website Visitors
Say you get 10,000 visits a month to your website. You know that the people visiting your website interacted with it somehow.
Maybe they read your content or see your products, or they want to learn more about your company.
But you don’t have their email address, which means there’s no way for you to reach them.
That’s where retargeting comes in. You can use tracking pixels (snippets of code on your website) to mark visitors with a cookie.
You can then show those visitors relevant ads on display networks of Google, Social Media channels like Facebook, etc. And get them back to your site.
Retarget Contacts in Your Database
You can supplement your marketing automation with paid retargeting to nurture leads into becoming customers.
Essentially, you can upload a list of email addresses, phone numbers, or, Twitter handles that you have in your database.
And then show ads to just those people on that native platform, such as Facebook or Twitter.
Now you can also upload a list of phone numbers in Google Ads and target specifically those users.
And this ad type is the more direct and gives a very high conversion rate.
Retargeting is a great way to engage your existing audience across other platforms they might be frequenting without being interruptive.
Key Takeaways on Paid Advertising
Paid search advertising can be a valuable digital marketing tactic for small businesses.
It helps drive more traffic to your site from the search engines and helps ensure that this traffic is relevant.
Though PPC ads do require an investment, when implemented correctly, these ad campaigns can offer small businesses an attractive ROI.
Sometimes businesses lose the money in paid advertising, spending more money than they see in return.
Because they don’t have the time or expertise to manage an online advertising campaign.
Though Google makes it easy to sign up for Google Ads and start a campaign. But you need experience with PPC ads if you want to optimize your ad budget.
Digitoly offers PPC ad management services that help you improve your visibility on the search engines.
Our PPC experts know the ins and outs of paid advertising and focus on developing ad campaigns that drive conversions.
If you’re ready to get started with your Paid Advertising campaigns, contact us for a free consultation.
