Paid Search With Google Ads: [Intro to PPC Campaigning]

Intro to Paid Search

Reaching a top organic search spot on a SERP can take years of disciplined SEO. In the meantime, we still want to generate leads and ensure that people can find our products and services. Employing paid search campaigns is vital to increasing awareness while maximizing conversion potential.

Paid search refers to the process of creating ads to be shown on a SERP. Platforms like GoogleAds allow us to create campaigns based on keywords, and then show ads to individuals that make relevant queries on search engines. Unlike banner or "interruptive" ads, paid search campaigns only show up in response to searches that contain specified keywords, which generally increases receptiveness.

PPC and Bidding

Paid search campaigns implement PPC (pay-per-click) which means that no cost is incurred until someone actually clicks on your ad.

Cost-per-click is dependent on the specific keywords used in the campaign; using a tool like Google Keyword Planner allows you to see data involving relevant keyword usage, and the estimated CPC.

Bidding allows you to choose how much you want to PPC for a specified keyword. Cost estimates are given, but you have the ability to make the final decision on how much you are willing to bid. That being said, your bid can affect the placement and frequency of your ads, so a bare minimum bid isn't always advantageous. A ranking called quality score has also been implemented to ensure that the highest payer doesn't get the highest placement by default. This ensures that larger competitors can't dominate search results simply due to budget.

Keyword Matching

Once you have developed a keyword strategy, you can use match-type settings to impact the way your ads are shown:

Different keyword campaigns will have different objectives, and certain match types are more effective at achieving specific goals than others. For example, if one of your campaigns aims to increase reach, the broad match type will likely find more individuals. However, it's important to understand that this increased reach won't necessarily translate to an increased conversion rate. Broad match types consider misspellings and synonyms, so it's possible that your ads may reach a smaller percentage of qualified leads. Make sure to define goals for each campaign so that you can implement the most relevant techniques.

Ad Rank

Ads receive an ad rank, which helps determine ad order for a SERP based on a keyword. Ad rank is determined by bid and quality score.

As mentioned above, quality score was created to prevent campaigns from achieving higher ad rankings based solely on budget. There are many factors that contribute to quality score such as click-through rate, ad relevance to keyword, and landing page experience.

Utilize Paid Search

Paid search is especially appealing due to its measurability and flexibility. When used in tandem with SEO efforts, we can maximize awareness, lead generation, and even increase conversion rates. Like any digital marketing process, optimizing paid search requires iteration, adjustment, and patience. You can also create mid-campaign adjustments, whether that be increasing bids on highly productive keywords, or pausing those that don't deliver results.

MBA Program Using PPC

Amidst the pandemic, college enrollment rates have decreased multiple points in response to the remote education format. Many individuals felt that they would receive a lower quality of education, which in turn led to both undergrad and grad students' withdrawal from universities.

So let's say we're an MBA program attempting to increase awareness of our program to drive application inflow. SEO efforts for our program's website should be implemented, but this is also a great opportunity to utilize paid search techniques. I want to go over the generalized process I would follow if I were to run paid search campaigns for this program.

In this example, I would utilize Google Ad campaigns. After setting up a program-specific account, keyword research would begin. Google Keyword Planner is one tool I would implement to find the most relevant MBA program-related terms. When selecting keywords, it's important to consider factors like website, or program-specific themes. These could include school and program name, degree title, and more. Projective techniques allow us to reverse-engineer the paid search process. Let's imagine we are prospective MBA students searching for a program. What would my query in a search engine look like? Generating a list of terms and comparing them to GKP is a great way to kick off your keyword strategy research.

Once we have a list of keywords, we need to ensure that our goals are clearly defined so that we can create segmented campaigns that correspond to objectives. In this example, we want to increase awareness and drive potential leads toward the conversion goal of application submission. For each campaign, we can select the match type that best aligns with our specific goal. For example, we may have allocated a smaller amount of our budget to a reach campaign in which we want to implement a broad match type for a more generic keyword like "MBA" or MBA_Program". We probably won't expect this to be our highest converting campaign, but it will be effective in creating program awareness.

With our outlined objectives and list of relevant keywords, we can now begin the bidding process based on how much we are willing to pay-per-click. Remember, no matter how much we bid for a keyword, our ad ranking can't be maximized if we aren't creating engaging ads with relevant information that drives action. Based on our budget, we could split bids among keyword campaigns that are likely to drive the most traffic, with a higher allocation to phrase and exact match types. Implementing ad extensions can also provide useful information such as our links, location, or phone number to prospective students.

Finally, our ad campaigns have been created, and we can begin tracking our progress!

If we notice that certain MBA-related keywords are over or under-achieving, we can make appropriate bid adjustments. With iteration and adjustment, we should see an increase in traffic and progress toward our conversion goals.

Hopefully, this guide to paid search has provided some insight into the ad creation and campaign process!

Citations and Resources