Let's Understand the Basics of Paid Digital Ads
Paid digital advertising is a marketing method where the business owner pays a publisher or website owner to assist with search engine optimization. Each time a search engine is used to find the answers to questions raised by a potential consumer, rankings improve. Rankings increase when someone clicks or views a business’ ad, a website, social media, or a miscellaneous digital platform page.
Advantages to Paid Ads
There are some advantages to paid ads. They increase brand recognition and provide brand identity so that potential consumers are drawn and engaged with the brand. They primarily target the potential consumers searching for a similar product or service.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
PPC ads have been an effective paid advertising strategy. PPC accounts for over 65% of clicks, compared to just 35% generated through organic search results.
PPC ads are an internet advertising model used to drive traffic to websites. It only costs money when it brings attention to your website through the searcher clicking on the website. Many different platforms offer pay-per-click advertising.
Keyword research is involved in pay-per-click advertising. Companies pay a higher fee for a prominent ad within the search results for a popular keyword compared to a word or phrase that isn’t used as often.
PPC advertising is affordable for companies that provide relevant and valuable content. The more effective a business is at serving the searcher’s needs, the less a search engine will charge them to promote their products and services. Paid search work makes sense.
A PPC campaign brings in more site visitors than the businesses pay per click. When a potential consumer clicks on an ad and then converts into a repeat customer, the cost per click is a good investment. When a business calculates the cost per conversion, it makes sense to invest in advertising.
Landing Page Attraction
Websites that have landing pages are designed to attract the attention of searchers. Aside from optimizing for user action, landing pages make it easier to attract visitors and track their activity. These pages optimize the searchers’ experience when visiting your site, especially true for first-time users.
Because landing pages help convert potential customers (leads) into paying customers, these pages are critical pages of any digital marketing strategy. Landing pages help guide first term users further, so they continue on their journey because of lead magnets that encourage engagement.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is Different than an Organic Search
PPC ads
As mentioned above, a PPC is accomplished through purchasing paid social advertising through third-party networks. Paid social advertising is when a business displays paid advertising content on third-party social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Salesforce, and Google My Business. The goal is to target specific potential customers to convert to paying long-term customers.
There are benefits of paid search ads because, as a business, you are guaranteed to reach a defined potential customer base. These potential customers may or may not convert to long-term paying customers; however, the visibility with a target customer base increases visibility and exposure. Because paid search ads gather data on paid ad campaigns and user clicks, your business can then have the necessary information to evaluate your brand and what targeting is working to engage more leads.
Organic Search
This type of search by a potential consumer looking for answers, and the answers are provided without the business paying for the service. It is a free listing in Goggle Search or another search engine that appears relevant because of a searcher’s search terms. Some ways to improve your organic search results are to make sure you research and define your keywords without stuffing them on your page. Write good content that will give people looking for answers the correct answer. Create landing pages and cornerstone pages. Make sure your page titles are optimized. Write meta descriptions that drive user clicks.
A meta description is an HTML element that summarizes a web page. This description is then displayed as part of the search snippet in a search engine results page (SERP). It is meant to give the person searching for answers an idea of the content within the page and how it relates to their search what they asked. It’s like a short abstract.
What is the Right Solution?
Are you looking for the right solution to PPC vs. using organic searches? This seems like a simple question, right? The challenge is it doesn’t have a simple answer.
First, you have to make some discoveries and look at different factors within your business. The answer depends on your goals and objectives for your business, your financial portfolio, what business industry you are in, what is currently happening with your website performance and conversion rate.
Marketing can be expensive, and your budget will define what you can and can’t afford to do or tell you what you can’t afford to do. Is it better for you as a business owner to buy your way into the top three search engine results page or take the time and expense to work with your SEO strategy?
The answer is both should be a part of your search engine marketing strategy. People from all walks of life use Goggle, Bing, Yahoo for discovery. About 93% of all website traffic comes from search engines, so it makes sense to tap into both.
Search Engines
There a several search engines. The top three are Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Google search engine is also one of the most popular products from Google. Bing was launched in 2009 and is Microsoft’s answer to Google. Yahoo, in a recent reportas a market share of 7.68 percent. Although a leader is a free email provider, this has been declining significantly recently. These search engines and other search engines provide businesses with opportunities to build business every hour every day.
Search Engine Results
Most search queries are two to four words long when potential consumers are searching. For instance, “What pawnshop is near me?” They consist of proper names, focus words, keywords, and these two things result in keyword search engine results for the consumer. Headlines are also helping search engine results because the search engines can decide whether what is being offered matches what is being asked. One way to think about it is that the title searchers see on your blog posts, whereas the SEO titles are what searchers see in search engines.
Major search engines like Google and Bing allow for up to 30 characters for two headlines, and Yahoo is a little different because it will allow for one headline up to 50 characters.
Keywords
Keywords and keyword phrases should be part of your content marketing strategy in your web content. SEO keywords make it possible for people to find your business site via search engines. A well-optimized website for search engines will bring in potential consumers and “speaks the same language” as the searcher.
Keyword research helps identify what keywords searchers enter into a search engine to find answers. Optimizing keyword research to identify the right keywords will help engage searchers, increase conversations, place keywords in the right spot, and expand how “long-tail keywords” are used.
Long-tail keywords are more specific phrases that future consumers would like to use when they are closer to engaging, like purchasing an item. Keywords and long-tail keywords are both contribute to how your page ranks.
To improve ranking optimize keyword research, include PPC ads on search engine pages such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and put time and effort into content and organic listings.
Let’s talk about Google Ads and Google PPC Ads.
Search advertising assumes the user searches are based on the potential consumers’ intent and the likelihood of purchasing something, and the assumption is they are ready to buy. As a business owner, the results you will see from Facebook’s social advertising and Google ads will differ.
Google Ads is an online advertising platform developed by Google. Businesses bid on keywords or phrases related to their business and brand. These ads then work on a PPC, meaning that you will only pay when ads are clicked. It can place ads both in the results of search engines like Google Search and on non-search websites, mobile apps, and videos.
Google ads are not free.
The average Google AdWords cost per click is somewhere between $1 and $2 on the advertising network. Expensive AdWords can cost $50.0 or higher per click.
To set up Google ads, you can first learn some terms and their meaning. Understand what keywords are, what a bid is, what CPC means. We gave briefly discussed these in this Blog.
Understand that a quality score is a metric that tells you how relevant keywords did or didn’t affect your ad. A good quality score can lower your bid costs and improve your ad rank and search results.
Ad Rank
Ad rank is where your ad shows up in relation to other ads when it’s triggered to appear on Google. Your businesses bid on specific keywords, along with your quality score, and other factors will contribute to where your Google ads rank.
The result is converting a searcher through Google ads to take another action (lead magnet) like filling out a form, engaging in a conversation, signing up for a newsletter, or even calling your business.
Ad Extensions
Ad extensions are add ons that show extra information like your business address, your phone number, and more webpage links that all expand your paid ads with more information.
When you want to work with Google ads and achieve the highest ad rank you can, set your account up for success by categorizing your products and services. This will help you set up your Google ads account structure. To make things a bit easier, look at your website and structure your categories similar to it.
Google ads have two levels of organization; campaigns (the higher level) and ad groups (the lower level. You can have multiple ad groups in each campaign. The more focused and specific your ads are, the more potential consumers your business can reach.
Budget
When you set your business to use paid ads with Google Ads, you, as the business owner, can control how much you spend. You can place your bids and your daily budget. A maximum bid is the amount of money you will spend on competitive keywords. In most situations, you will pay less than the maximum bid price, and you have the option to change your bid at any time.
When looking at your business’s marketing budget, it is good to spread your budget across campaigns. Remember, you can have more than one paid search campaign, and this will allow you to determine what is working when you look at the data provided through analytics. You can analyze how effective each ad campaign was in reaching potential consumers. This is true for setting bids for your keywords as well. Placing a bid that will help get your ad a desirable ranking, while still staying within your budget is essential.
Facebook Ads
Facebook has many ways to run paid ads. A quick and easy way is to post something for sale in Facebook Marketplace and boost the ad from your personal account.
Targeted ads can be added to your business page, and targeted ads focus on a specific group of potential consumers. The targeting is reasonably accurate because Facebook collects data from consumers’ input on Facebook, like what sites they visit and demographics.
As a business owner, you can run three different targeted ads. Saved audiences, custom audiences, and lookalike audiences. Saved audiences target specific interests, behaviors, income levels, locations, and other criteria.
Facebook paid ads to a specific audience or target helps to drive messages, web traffic, sales, in-store directions, phone calls, and engagement activities like clicking a button to subscribe. Hence, people in the potential consumer audience take an interest in your business and do something.
Driving ads means getting people to want to engage. To drive traffic so potential consumers visit your site, you can make sure your content is excellent and ask people to share. Content needs to have mass appeal, meaning many people will want to engage in it or look at it.
Content can also be created for lookalike audiences. A lookalike audience is a way to reach new potential consumers who might be interested in your business or product by understanding similar characteristics of your existing customers and using these characteristics to perk interest in the lookalike group.
As a business owner, you can choose to run a picture, video, and product ad. For example, a common strategy is to post videos and then target ads to people who watch more than 10 seconds of the video. Facebook can be complex, and specific strategies work better in different markets.
Get Them In the Funnel
Facebook has a sales funnel designed to capture the desires and interests of potential consumers and nurture them until they are ready to purchase your product. Nurturing engages the potential customer and helps them see your business as a trustworthy place to go. Through deliberate, slow, targeted messaging, potential consumers move closer to converting into loyal customers.
Funnels
When driving Facebook paid ads, “funnels” take the potential consumer to the exact product or service you are targeting the ad with. For example, if you are selling cash to people for loans, it may be better to drive them to a funnel page only focused on this service to get the best “conversion.”
Facebook ads do well when they are aligned with other traffic campaigns. Running radio ads, tv ads, Google ads, and other marketing all work together will move your marketing efforts forward.
Automated Marketing and CRM Platform for Pawn Shops and Small Business
Pawn Leads is an automated marketing and CRM platform designed with pawn shops and small businesses in mind. Pawn Leads offers a Customer Communication System and provides a complete Marketing Solution for Pawn Brokers. Because of the automated system and support, you can follow up with every potential opportunity that comes through your doors.
All communications from your customers are tracked in one convenient place, so you don’t risk losing that Post-It with notes. Custom automated follow-up text, email, webchat replies all increase conversion. Get phone call feedback to help close more deals and understand how to promote more sales.
Integrated Marketing Solutions like Google and FB Ads and other paid digital advertising adds to search engine optimization. Pawn Leads knows how to do SEO, text ads, search advertising, paid search campaigns, ad placement, PPC ad use and management, PPC campaigns, and website builds.
