Paid Search
Hope everyone is having a great start to the week, today I wanted to go over paid search and how to best utilize it.
What is Paid Search?
According to Search Engine Watch, paid search is defined as a "form of digital marketing where search engines such as Google and Bing allow advertisers to show ads on their search engine results pages (SERPs)". Paid search results are found anywhere and everywhere on a search engine, and look similar to this:
Paid search can sometimes be confused with all advertisements that pop up on your computer, but it's far from it. Paid search is completely different than advertisements like banner ads, in that the advertisements come about based completely off of what the customer intently typed in the search engine bar. So to put it frankly, paid search is way less annoying to a consumer.
Pay-per-click (PPC) is a form of paid search and it used by businesses in a digital marketing format where they only pay a fee for every time that their specific advertisement is viewed by a consumer.
Although an organic search presence is needed, paid search is important to utilize because PPC visitors are 50% more likely to purchase something than organic visitors.
Why Use Paid Search?
Even though PPC sounds somewhat daunting and expensive, there are a couple big reasons as to why a business should partake in paid search advertising:
- PPC produces faster results than organic.
- Easily measurable in determining ROI.
- More qualified potential customers that have already displayed a certain level of interest.
Google Ads vs Bing Ads
When creating a digital advertisement campaign, it's helpful to know a number of things before choosing between Google or Bing depending on the campaign.
Google Ads:
By now you have probably come to realization that Google is the dominant search engine, owning 71% of search market share. Google Ads has more overall reach to consumers than any other search engine and receives over 63,000 searches per second of any given day. Wow that is a lot.
There are several factors on where an advertisement would land on a search engine results page (SERP). The Ad rank on Google depends on the following:
- The bid amount for the advertisement.
- Quality of landing pages (how relevant the given information is).
- Content of search.
Bing Ads:
If Google is such a dominant search engine, why even look to use Bing for a digital advertisement campaign?
Bing Ads can reach 167 million unique users that spend 26% more online than the average internet searcher and the CPC (cost-per-click) and CPA (cost-per-acquisition) is lower than Google Ads. So Bing Ads is the way to go if on a smaller budget. Bing Ads is highly saturated with engaged and high-quality consumers, so even though it doesn't have as much of a reach as Google Ads, it's still a great opportunity.
And the cherry on top: Bing Ads has better targeting options to be able to reach the desired customer (listed below).
Paid Search for WWU MBA Program
In this hypothetical case of creating an ad campaign for Western Washington University's MBA program, there are a couple of ways that PPC could increase awareness and lead to conversions.
In this scenario, the use of keywords are extremely important because it is cheaper and ultimately lead to more clicks. An example of a couple effective keywords would be: "MBA", "graduate degree" or even "masters business program".
There are a lot of MBA programs out there, and for the sake of efficiency, it would be more viable to focus the ad campaign specifically to residents that live in Washington. This could be done by entering in zip codes in both Google and Bing ads and would produce an overall higher higher click rate.
Takeaway
Paid search is on the rise and can be extremely viable for a business if done correctly and using both Google and Bing Ads are a step in the right direction to gain a larger online advertising presence. I hope this helped and as always, feel free to contact me with any questions!