Paid search marking is one of the oldest forms of digital marketing out there. It consists of paying search engines to show links to your business alongside their search results. Google, for example, will show paid search results at the top of the list, before showing the regularly ranked pages. If you’ve been wondering whether or not this type of marketing is a good fit for your business, here are some of the strengths of paid search marketing.
1 – Targeting
Big tech giants like Google and Facebook have made much of their fortune by leveraging their massive amounts of data in order to help advertisers. This means that, with sufficient knowledge or help from a seasoned paid search agency, there is almost no limit to how specific you can get when it comes to targeting your paid search ads on major search engines.
Some of the targeting criteria commonly used by advertisers include age, location, nationality, and more. You can also target ads based on people’s interests, habits, which keywords were used, and even choose to have your ads appear only on specific times and dates. So if you’re selling something relevant to an ongoing sports event or live TV show, you can set it up so your ads will only appear around the time slot of the broadcast.
2 – Speed
While options like email marketing and social media marketing can take months before they start generating a steady inflow of traffic, it is possible to get a paid search campaign going and generating leads within a couple of hours. The downside is that paid search marketing won’t help you gain an audience on its own; the ads will be gone the moment you stop paying the search engines to display them.
3 – Research
Since paid search campaigns can be very well targeted, launched quickly, and generate a ton of data, they can work as an excellent tool for market research. You use this type of marketing to measure how well your current marketing approach and sales pitch will perform when placed in front of different groups. This can not only reveal flaws with your sales pitch and landing page, but it can help you find target audiences that you may not have initially realized were interested in your product.
4 – Competition
Search engines have complicated algorithms that are used to rank their search results and users seldom go past the first page results when doing their research. This means that any of your competitors who have secured positions on the first page of a given search will have an advantage over your business. However, paid search ads can allow you to appear on top of other results on various keywords, showing your page before that of your competitors.
Google and other search engines will, of course, disclose that the top results are ads. But most users don’t care as long as your link is able to provide what they are looking for.
5 – Consistency
Since most paid search advertising follows a pay-per-click system, this allows you to know exactly how many visitors you’ll get out of your initial investment. This combined with knowledge of your current conversion rate will allow you to know beforehand how many sales a paid search campaign is likely to generate, within a margin of error. It also helps that when setting up a paid search campaign, you can limit how often your ads will appear, and how many clicks you’re going to get per day, week, or month.
Having this level of control over how many sales you’ll be making and how often has a wide range of advantages. For example, this allows you to tweak your marketing campaign in a way that will make sure your sales team, customer support, and fulfillment systems are never overwhelmed. It also helps prevent your site from slowing down or crashing due to sudden spikes in traffic. And it can make inventory management much easier, especially if your store specializes in just one or a few items.
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