What you need to know about paid search
Paid search, more commonly know as search engine marketing, SEM, PPC or pay-per-click, is a marketing method where advertisers pay for their website to appear in the paid advertising sections of search engine results pages (SERP), such as Google.com. The idea behind paid search is to allow your website listing to appear on the first page of search engine results when users search on keywords related to your products or services. For example, if your business sells “new balance running shoes” for seniors, you would would want your website site to show up on Google when some searches on keywords related to “new balance running shoe.” For a business selling to seniors, you can also consider targeting users age 60 and over for a more targeted reach for your keywords, or simply bid higher for keywords in your specific demographic. All of this is possible with paid search. You can be as specific as you’d like with your keywords, demographic targeting, geographic targeting, time of day targeting, day of week targeting and your budgets. With paid search, you have complete control over how much your will to pay per click, per keyword and how much you’re willing to spend in total for all keywords during the course of a day or month.
Building a successful paid search marketing or paid media program is more than just driving search engine traffic to your website. It’s about driving targeted traffic to your site from multiple sources that will ultimately result in increased transactions, higher ROI or leads on your website. Our job is to create a unique paid media strategy that will bring you closer to your targeted audience. Whether it’s through Google, YouTube, Facebook, Yahoo or Bing our job is to place your paid media ads on relevant websites, reaching people who are most likely to be interested in the products and services.
Our paid media strategy focuses on extensive research of our customer’s business objectives, marketing goals, products and service offerings. This is the only way to clearly understand our customer’s needs and target market, which will ultimately dictate the direction of our paid media strategy. Our objective is also to understand the customer journey and lifecycle of our client’s customers so that we can build a search strategy targeting each level of the customer journey.
For lead generation clients, our emphasis is on driving qualified leads to their site, while making certain that the client’s website is fully capable of tracking the engagement of site visitors, as they navigate through the website and ultimately complete the lead requirement. Through analytics, we will be able to track each paid media click and lead conversion based on the source, whether at the keyword, user device type, referral site, click-type or geography level. this level of analytics detail allows us to optimize your paid media program, using concrete data and performance details about your visitors and their interaction with your website.
From an analytics and ecommerce perspective, it is critical to have the properly website tracking in place in order to track web engagement, transactions and revenue, as well as track page specific goals that act as indicators for future transactions. For example, if a visitor signs up for your email newsletter or register for an account, or fills out a contact form, these activities all act as indicators, or “goals” which can ultimately be measured as an indicator for future interaction with your website.
At Visionary Search, we help guide you through the tracking process to ensure proper set up in order for us to successfully create, analyze and optimize your paid media programs to your ROI or CPL goals.
