Search Engine Advertising + Optimization

Paid search marketing is the short-term solution to search engine optimization. You should be running ads on Microsoft and Google networks, ensuring your business gets in front of customers when they are searching for terms related to your product or service. EMarketer predicts that online ad spend will top $39.5 billion in 2012, a 23.3% increase over 2011 and a figure that tops traditional print advertising.

Paid search offers better targeting, real-time analytics, and the ability to change under-performing ads on the fly. Seventy-seven percent of North American households are using the Internet, which means that there are 228.1 million people online in North America. Precise geo-targeting allows you to get in front of your customer and gives you the ability to track your ad spend down to the cent, in real time.

The best way to combat slipping conversion rates is to optimize the PPC campaign beyond bid management. Tactics like ad copy optimization and landing page optimization allow you to increase your average conversion rate. With these techniques, your quality scores should improve and your average cost-per-click should decrease. 

Careful scrutiny of your keyword list is also important. Manually managing the bids for your most important terms will ensure that you’re not reducing your bids on important brand visibility terms. Data analysis allows for the extraction of any terms that are irrelevant by adding them to the negative keywords list. Here are four ways optimization can help you achieve more:

• More clicks and traffic to your website.
• Higher profits and improved return on investment.
• Lower costs.
• Ability to accomplish any other advertising goals.