Paid Search Strategies You Should Take Advantage Of

If you’€™re looking for the best ROI (Return on Investment) for your digital marketing campaign then it;s advisable to look no further than paid search marketing strategies. Paid search offers not only the best ROI, but it’€™s also the most effective way of increasing your website’€™s visibility and that is the motive, the rationale and essentially -€“ the entire point to a digital marketing campaign.

So what exactly is paid search marketing? Paid search marketing/advertising is also known as CPC (cost-per-click) or PPC (pay-per-click) marketing, the latter of which you have no doubt heard of in the past. Paid search marketing is also sometimes referred to as SEM; the abbreviation for ‘Search Engine Marketing’€™, but this is a broader term that also includes Search Engine Optimisation, usually abbreviated to SEO. Most successful digital marketing campaigns include both paid search and SEO because they have been found to effectively complement each other as part of a comprehensive digital marketing campaign.

So what are the best paid search strategies to implement?

As you can well imagine, opinions are going to vary wildly here, so instead of giving one paid search strategy the thumbs up over another, what we’€™ll look at here are two of the most popular paid search strategies that many businesses and companies have found advantageous to implement -€“ mobile search advertising and branding.

Mobile search advertising -€“ It should come as no surprise that mobile search advertising is on the rise. It is among the fastest growing advertising sectors and the numbers speak for themselves -€“ the sector has grown 90% over the past three years and the percentage of the overall budget that has been spent by the average company on mobile search advertising has increased to 22% in 2013, up from 2.1% in 2010. That’s a tenfold increase in three years.

What’s more, according to a Google Adwords blog posted in July of this year, an average of 88% of visitors to mobile sites are referred by mobile search advertising and mobile ad search results provided advertisers with more click traffic than organic results. Numbers aside, it simply makes sense to increase the budget allocated to mobile search engine advertising because the way consumers source information and conduct research online has changed over a very short period of time and research and studies point to this as a continuing trend.

Branding -€“ It will prove extremely advantageous to include branding as a paid search strategy in any digital marketing campaign carried out internally within your organisation, or with the assistance and expertise of an experienced digital marketing agency. From an ROI perspective, non-branded ads are considered to be a waste of time, effort and money, all of which could have been utilised far more effectively.

Advertising and branding are inextricably linked, so it not only makes sense to take this reality into account, but to also look at the figures, and they’re also saying that combining branding with paid search advertising is the way to go. A Google report from 2012 highlights the importance of branding and paid search advertising, and it also points out that just over 50% of shoppers did their research online and bought what they were researching offline. This offers businesses an excellent opportunity to promote their brand by combining their branding and paid search marketing efforts.

As was mentioned earlier, opinions are sure to clash and differ over what exactly are the best paid search strategies to implement, though whatever your opinion and wherever your desire to source the most effective search strategies takes you, insist upon utilising paid search strategies that offer you the best ROI.