Have you questioned if your business should invest in paid search marketing, or paid advertisements? A few reasons to use paid search marketing include: immediate and consistent results, top results on the first page of search engine results, and the ability to target advertisements. Check out our Whiteboard Wednesday to learn more about paid search marketing!
Paid Search Marketing – Transcript:
Welcome back to Whiteboard Wednesday with Gauge Digital Media. I’m Brett, and today Becca and I will take you through, search engine marketing or SEM. What that is, and how it differs from organic SEO, that we’ve been talking about in our previous Whiteboard Wednesdays.
First, what is search engine marketing? This is a paid effort, done by businesses, to place their advertisements for the company in the sponsored section in a search engine, like Google or a partner website. Companies, generally, pay-per-click. They set an ad budget on a monthly basis. Every time someone clicks their ad, they pay-per-click, also known as PPC. The price per click varies. It is based on how competitive the industry is, how competitive the exact keywords are, and many other factors we are not going to go into detail about in this short video. If you’d like to learn more, check us out.
Google is consistently making the paid advertisements look like the organic search results. This is great for businesses, because in the past, an advertisement would only pop up on the right hand side of Google search results. Consumers caught onto this, so the click through rate was dropping. Now, the paid advertisements pop up right above the local results. When you search Google, you will see paid advertisements at the top (up to four), local search results, organic search results, and then there are paid advertisements at the bottom of the page as well.
Originally, the only way you could tell that it was a paid advertisement, was that there was a little yellow box that said ad, right next to the URL of the company. Now, that box is green, so it looks even more like an organic search result. This is great for companies because people are clicking through more often than they would when the paid advertisement was located on the right hand side.
So, just a little bit about Google AdWords, and how awesome it is. The results are immediate, consistent and they are targeted, which Becca will talk you through a little bit more.
Now we are going to discuss why Pay-Per-Click is beneficial to your business. The reasons to use Paid Search Marketing, include:
- First page exposure in the top 3 search engines
- Immediate traffic
- Consistent traffic
- Targeted ads
- A large reach
First page exposure in the top 3 search engines is the number 1 reason to use paid search marketing. It is crucial for your business to be seen in the top 5 results in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. People rarely look beyond the first page of search results. This is why Pay Per Click Marketing is the fastest way to get an advertisement for your business to show in the top 5 results.
The next reason is immediate traffic. A business can set up their pay-per-click campaign on Google, Bing and even YouTube. Business’ can now have their advertisements placed on the top of the first page of search results. People are likely to click the first link the see, which results in immediate traffic for your business.
Consistent traffic is an additional reason to use paid search marketing. It is important to drive as many people to your website. With paid search marketing, it is possible to control traffic amounts based on how much the business is willing to pay per click.
Paid search marketing comes with the benefit of targeted ads with the ability to remarket and retarget your advertisement. What makes remarketing different from standard display advertising is the targeting. The main point of remarketing is that you want to find users who have shown enough interest in your business’ products or services to visit your website. These users are tracked and based on the analytics, these ads can be edited and remarketed for maximum success.
A final reason to use paid search marketing is because there is a large reach. Google is the #1 search engine with a market share of over 65%-70% over other search engines. Since people prefer Google the reach is huge when using paid search marketing, like Google AdWords.
So, we want to leave you with a few statistics that we found in a Google postcard, that was sent to our business. 82% of smartphone users say they use search to find a local business. By 2018, calls to US business driven by Google search are expected to grow to 73 billon. Thank you Google for those statistics. Thank you guys for checking out Whiteboard Wednesday, we look forward to seeing you back next week. If you have questions, or would like to learn more about what we talked about today, you can always check us out at www.gaugedigitalmedia.com
