Paid Search: How to Ensure You Get The Best Bang For Buck

We all know Google is a powerful platform and AdWords accounts for over 30% of all digital marketing spend in the U.S.

Knowing this, it’s important to ensure your brand is not left behind when it comes to paid search.

However, say you have your budget, and your keywords, including your ads, are ready to go. Does that mean you’re ready to launch? No, not quite.

Don’t panic; below are some targeting considerations that make or break the success of your campaigns.

Strategically, SEM targeting settings fall into two categories:

• Some influence budget.
• Others impact on user experience.

Elements for Targeting Experience: 

• Audiences
• Geography targeting
• Language
• Location

Check for Audience Insights

We all know of the audiences available in campaigns. Nonetheless, are you regularly checking and using those insights to adjust your messaging and landing page strategy periodically?

The audiences can:

• Confirm existing concepts of who your users are.

This is obviously based on their interests and demographic profiles.

Do not forget first-party audiences.

Here, you can use RLSA campaigns to:

• Upsell to some converters.
• Resell to past or non-converting users.
• Overall, this info provides you with valuable facts regarding behavioural elements of audiences who are or who are not converting.

Geographic Targeting

It’s mostly self-explanatory. Customers in different geographic areas will likely buy various products at different times of the year.

So instead of piling up with added advertisers, think of prioritising locations and creating specific campaigns for those other high ROI areas so you can double down there.

Don’t forget that this granularity confuses campaigns management considerably, and the added time doesn’t always result in enhanced performance.

Radius targeting, Zip code, and DMA are, but if they are used at scale, their precision will quickly make your campaigns unwieldy. So this is really something for your business to give thought to.

Targeting Via Language

For sites which are available in multiple languages!

Don’t automatically go with the default campaign settings. Instead, consider if it is worth having multiple campaigns targeting users in different languages.

Also, remember that diverse understandings of your brand values and different attributes should be addressed using varying degrees of formality.

Our Tip of the day is for you to: Localise ad messages and adapt page content to singular language user groups to address varying cultural preferences.

User Location Targeting

Google’s default and recommended settings aren’t always the best options to use. They and can sometimes lead to unwanted user experiences and unforeseen cost, especially when it comes to location-based businesses.

That’s due to Google presentation ads not only based on where audiences are located but also if they show interest in the hotel’s location.

Which enables you to manage your user experience best while streamlining budgets, I would suggest targeting with “People in your targeted locations” as highlighted in the screenshot.

Then Introduce Some Cost-Saving Elements!

Targeting Devices

For advanced consideration items, those with high purchase values, you’d often find a dramatic gap between their shares of traffic and revenue from non-desktop devices.

Day Parting

Meaning limiting exposure as to the Hour of the day or the Day of the week, or even both.

What about Prioritising Business Opening Hours?

If your business relies on call centre processed leads, then consider limiting your campaigns to avoid backlogs.

Avoiding inefficient Periods

Seasonality gets to the best of us, and it happens weekly with things like cost per acquisition continually fluctuating.

So, before pulling the trigger to try to exclude any day or hourly gap, meaning you should analyse your shoulder periods.

Partner with Different Networks

Partner networks are often overlooked. In fact, they are often opted in by default when of setting up.

And they’ve continued to remain the least efficient over the years. They also have a small share of the overall traffic and the budget.

But anyone who’s looking for savings and efficiency must, by all means, consider a test running without the engagement of partner networks.

Conclusion

Believe it or not, these are the best practices, when it comes to saving on budgets and targeting the right consumers. So when looking to make your paid search campaigns are lean and mean, these are the steps to follow.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

If you want to get more on an in-depth look ,check out the Digital School of Marketing’s Digital Marketing Course. For more information about this and our other online digital marketing courses, please visit our website.