Paid Search & Display

What is it and how can it help small to medium businesses succeed?

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Paid search advertising is a digital marketing channel that enables businesses to pay search engines to place ads at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) to drive traffic to a website.

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What is PPC advertising?

PPC advertising (pay-per-click) is the most common form of paid search and is used by the world’s largest advertisers like Google, Bing, Yahoo. It means that companies only pay once someone clicks on their ad. PPC advertising is an affordable way to advertise because it ensures that your ads reach users who are actively searching for your company’s services or products.

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Why should you pay to be at the top of the SERP?

Google, the world’s largest search engine and advertiser, holds a 92% share of the global search engine market. It handles more than 3.5 billion searches per day and is the most-visited website in the world.

According to a study from Moz (2019), roughly 93% of website traffic comes from the first page of the Google search results. So that means that 3.25 billion of the 3.5 billion daily searches click on the first page Google results.

Although the study explains that 72% percent of respondents stated that they either click only on organic results, or on organic results the majority of the time, a survey from Clutch (2018) found that 75% of those surveyed claimed that they had clicked on a paid ad in the past month - and said that it had helped them find the information that they were looking for.

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In fact, despite the vast majority of searchers preferring to click on organic results over clicking on advertisements, large companies with more than $10 billion in annual revenue spend on average 12% of their marketing budget on digital advertising according to Gartner (2022). Additionally, 65% of small to mid-sized businesses have a PPC campaign and spend between $100,000 to $120,000 annually on Google Ads according to WebFX (2021). That means that on average, small to medium sized businesses spend $9,000 and $10,000 per month on their Google paid search campaigns. The statistics are not surprising however, as 80% of Google’s $68 billion revenue in Q1 2022 comes from advertising (Searchengineland.com, 2022) and has increased 23% year-over-year.

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5 Benefits of Paid Search

There are many benefits to why small and large are spending such large amounts on Paid search.

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1. Flexible Business Goals

Paid search can help businesses achieve a vast number of business and marketing goals. Since almost any type of conversion can be tracked, PPC can be effectively used for aligning website traffic to end-goals. Those goals can range from high-level brand exposure to lead generation or an ecommerce sale. By using the advanced reporting tools, it is possible to hone in on a specific goal and understand if the campaigns are working effectively.

The most common types of Business Goals for Paid Search with Google Ads are 

• Sales
• Leads
• Website Traffic
• Product and brand consideration
• Brand awareness and reach
• App promotion
• Local store visits and promotions

2. Cost effective

Since businesses only pay when someone clicks on the ad with PPC, no money is wasted, spent on impressions for users who are not actually engaged or interested. There are also no minimum spending requirements, unlike some other digital advertising platforms (mbbagency.com). For example, if campaigns are set at $1 a day on Google Ads - they will not spend more than $30 in that month. If the ads had a CPC of $0.50, they would generate 60 Clicks in that month which could increase the chances of sales on a website. For small companies trying to manage a minimal budget effectively, paid search is an excellent option to scale and increase the volume of customers.

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3. Tracking capabilities

Paid search tools are built with robust tracking, allowing businesses to track campaigns, their success and the users who click on the ads. By using the ads data, businesses can improve keywords, ads, and targeting to optimize ad costs. For example, by excluding the most CPC heavy keywords that did not result in conversions from a campaign - a business can reduce the overall CPC cost which will enable more budget to be focused on the highest converting keywords.

The data can also serve as valuable information for other marketing channels such as search, email and social media. As a result, businesses can use learnings from the ads to optimize their website towards the best performing paid search keywords, which reflect the terms and vocabulary that resonates with users. For example, if a successful campaign has a lot of ad clicks but very few conversions into actual sales, it means that the campaign is strong, and the keywords were effective, but the page's landing page content needs to be improved to increase conversion rates. Additionally, advertisers can identify what copy in the successful ad is driving more users to click, and use those elements to guide the future campaigns.

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The most common types of KPIs that advertisers track for Paid Search are

• Revenue
• Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) - revenue/ad spend
• Profit & Return on Investment (ROI) - Return/(Costs + Ad Spend)
• Branded vs. Non-Branded Traffic
• Cost Efficiency Metrics (CPCs, CPVs, CPMs)
• CTR - (Clicks/Impressions) ad relevance 
• Conversion Rate - (Conversions/Clicks) landing page, product and ad relevance
• Impression Share - SOV scalability of existing campaigns
• On-Site Engagement - bounce rate, avg session duration, avg # of pages visited
• Quality Score - ads health metric

(Searchenginejournal.com, 2021)

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4. Audience targeting

Paid Search offers different ways to target ads that allow businesses to hyper focus on prospective customers. There are various different targeting options that are designed to create a unique way for advertisers to reach their target audience. For example, through platforms like Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and others, advertisers can serve targeted messages to users based on content they’re viewing, behaviors they’ve exhibited, location, age, gender and more.

The advanced targeting capabilities allow advertisers to help narrow down the target audience and create very specific ads for them. As a result, multiple campaigns can run simultaneously to target different audiences and customer stages, with the search engines showing them to each specific market assigned. The technique allows businesses to segment different audiences without confusing them with multiple messaging. A broader reach into the target markets also increases the ability to nurture the users before converting them into sales.

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5. Quick & Immediate Results

In contrast to SEO efforts which take a lot of time and resources to build over many years, paid search allows businesses to get that same positioning within minutes of launch.

Even if the business is years behind its competitors, jumping into paid search lets advertisers get up and running quickly with some minimal optimization. As a result, a new business can gain a substantial presence in competitive markets by increasing its paid search presence.

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When compared to other channels like email and organic social, it gives businesses the advantage of targeting people outside of the users who are already aware of your brand. For example, email marketing tends to be more reliant on existing customers already on the email list - while paid search casts a wide net to find new prospects and customers that have never heard of the brand before. In fact it can also be used to increase the amount of prospects on that email list, that can then be retargeted with different messaging.

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Due to the ease of the software, most of the work is done within the advertising platform from the research to campaign build-out, to writing ads - which also enables more speed and efficiency. Aside from some minor conversion pixels that may require development teams to place them on specific landing pages, the platforms are very flexible and powerful.

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Summary

Paid Search advertising has proven to be a reliable and profitable channel for many B2B, B2C, nonprofits, and other companies of all sizes seeking quick, quality traffic and conversions.

As the upfront cost is very minimal, there is almost no risk in testing it out to see where it can move the needle and gain valuable data to inform the marketing team and optimization efforts.

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Charles Prime can provide a paid search consultation for your business and help you launch successful ad campaigns.

Please fill out the form below and let us know a little more about your company.

We will be in touch as soon as possible.