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Benefits of Paid Search

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Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What exactly are the benefits of paid search?

Meet business objectives

It can help you meet your business objectives, back to that consumer decision-making process. This is the commercial decision-making process in marketing. And you can align five of those points to your paid search. So paid search is as close to the consumer decision-making process as can be. Creating campaigns, using ads and keyword lists, that bridge the gap between your consumer needs and those business objectives.

Suppose you sell holidays, and someone, for example, is in the market for two weeks in California. Paid search bridges the gap between that need to go on a holiday and your business objective as you being the retailer of holidays. So you can see it’s them telling you what they want, and you delivering to them. It also gives you very fast access to the market.

Quick access to market

Paid search campaigns can be launched in the market at any time. It can take broadly 15 minutes to half an hour to get your campaigns up and running.

Mobile position

And another benefit of paid search in this device-driven economy is mobile position number one. So the first ad that anyone sees on a mobile search is the paid search ad and it’s, therefore, the most likely to be clicked because people don’t really thumb and scroll down. So if you can have your ad serving in a very high position for mobile search, you will drive most of those clicks.

It’s broadly around 58% of all clicks on a mobile device go to the paid search ads, which is a staggeringly high statistic. There are some additional advertising features within paid search. These are the ad enhancements like map extensions, app downloads, you can click to call, there’s dynamic ad copy.

Additional advertising features

There’s a load of different ad outputs available to search marketers that aren’t featured in the organic results. So that gives you a cutting-edge advantage over people who just solely focus on the organic results. Your ads are far more attractive.

Manage spend and ROI

Consider the control that you get from paid search in terms of managing your ROI. You do manage pretty much everything real time. If you just turn a campaign off in paid search, you will stop serving ads for that campaign in half an hour. If you change the ad copy, if you’ve got a new offer, if you’ve got something that’s time sensitive, that will appear in your ads within a very short period of time. Remember, it can take between two weeks to a couple of months for that to rank in organic search so any kind of time-sensitive activity is more suited to paid search activity.

Easily tracked

You’re tracking it, because with any kind of cost delivery, like paid search, you do want to see what you’re getting for what you’re paying. And the integration between Google Analytics and Google Ads makes it fairly straightforward. But there are URL Builder and URL techniques to bring your Bing stuff which is not a Google product but bring your Bing stuff into Google Analytics so you can track exactly what’s happening there.

Easily updated

Ad copy updates and new keywords relating to special offers can be added and launched within 30 minutes and paused with almost immediate effect at the end of the offer period. It isn’t possible to pause organic listings or even remove them from the SERP with ease.

Leverage buyer or search intent

It’s very important to leverage the buyer intent. People have a need, they have a want, and they’re researching, using keywords, and they’re looking around to see what they want to buy and they’re finding out information about your industry. And when you align your offering to their needs, that’s where the magic happens. So leveraging that buyer intent is essential to any kind of paid search success.

Compete in the marketplace

The other thing is everyone else is doing it. So you have to be able to compete in the marketplace. If you don’t do paid search, all your competitors are going to be doing it. So they’re going to be getting a share of that traffic from those consumers who have that intent to buy. In order to defend your position within the marketplace, you do need to compete on paid search.

Fill gaps in organic optimization

With the lag around two weeks to three months for organic search, you may not always rank highly for all the keywords that you want to. So paid search can just very quickly fill those gaps in organic optimization.

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Cathal Melinn

Cathal Melinn is a digital strategist, lecturer, and trainer. He has over 15 years’ experience in eCommerce, social media, affiliate marketing, data analytics, and all things digital. He worked at Yahoo! Search in 2005 as a Senior Search Strategist for the UK Financial Services vertical. He moved to the world of agency in 2010 as Head of Search and Online Media. Cathal’s previous clients include Apple, Vodafone, Expedia, Virgin, Universal Music Group, Amazon, Compare the Market, and HSBC.

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    ABOUT THIS DIGITAL MARKETING MODULE

    Paid Search
    Cathal Melinn
    Skills Expert

    This module begins with the key concepts of paid search and demonstrates how to set up a Google Ads account and create a paid search campaign. It explains how to manage a paid search campaign budget effectively and outlines the different methods that can be used to optimize your paid search campaign. It also covers how to measure and report on the success of a paid search campaign.

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