Online Brand Placement: How Paid Search Marketing Works
When leveraging your brand’s online visibility, you can either go through organic search strategies or paid search tactics. Depending on how you design your marketing plan, you may use either or both.
Paid search marketing comes in many names and abbreviations. You can read it as Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Pay-Per-Click (PPC), sponsored listings, and more. It’s an effective avenue to improve your brand’s online presence on a limited budget.
Utilizing paid search for brand visibility
A significant advantage of using paid search is the ability to appear at the top of search engine results pages immediately. Although it’s possible to do this through organic search strategies, it will take a long time for search engine web crawlers to index your site. This process will take weeks to months, depending on the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy. In contrast, paid search gives you immediate results on any platform.
Looking at paid search results as an online user
It’s easier to look from a top-down approach on how paid search appears on your marketing campaigns. When an online user uses a search engine, the search engine results page provides a list of possible search suggestions. These results appear in order of SEO ranking, from best to worst.
However, a little way above these organic search results are “Sponsored” search results. These are Product Listing Ads (PLAs) or Google Shopping ads that pop up when a user searches for a particular product. This ad placement will only be up for as long as the company hosting it can keep up with its bid price.
For non-product searches, your search results may view a set of product images that contain regular text ads. These link to search listings that will further expound on your keywords. These ad listings contain a small but identifiable “ad” label on the left of its web address.
Understanding Google’s advertising networks
One of the strongest avenues for paid search marketing is Google’s advertising networks. They provide a wide selection of paid search advertising venues like Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per Mile (CPM) advertising models. Google’s networks allow you to bid a set amount for each click to ensure that you’re only advertising what fits within your budget ceiling. Although Google is continually releasing new features, there are certain drawbacks you’ll experience when using Google Ad networks.
For one, Google’s introduction of Enhanced Campaigns let advertisers target people on particular time slots, locations, and devices. On paper, it reads like a sound moderating method to target specific markets. However, the update prevented people from targeting tablet users separately from desktop and mobile users. This made it harder for your ads to appear across the remaining two platforms if you choose to go for tablet-only markets, which are small and few.
The nature of search advertising is always changing, which is why Google’s rulings and guidelines tend to change over time. For this reason, you must always research the marketing channels you want to utilize for paid search marketing to ensure that you’re making the right investment.
Conclusion
The variety of marketing channels you can choose from with paid search marketing is numerous. There are plenty of marketing avenues and sponsored advertising programs that have their own set of target demographics. Understanding what will fit your marketing strategy best is an excellent way to develop your business’s online brand placement.
If you need digital strategy consulting in Greenwood, IN from a reputable digital firm, we’re the right company for you. Contact us today and let our marketing experts execute your paid search campaigns!
