Explore Lean’s Digital Marketing Project Goals and Vision
Introduction
In the MKT 363: Digital Consumer Search course, I understand that paid search is a strategy for marketers to effectively reach high-intention consumers through search engines. Paid search enables businesses to bid on keywords associated with the businesses’ products or service offering and receive advertisements placements directly within the search engine results pages. The most popular paid search platform is Google Ads, providing advertisers an opportunity to connect with users precisely at the time that the user seeks information via Google. Unlike organic SEO, paid search results can be seen immediately and have quantifiable results. To gain a thorough understanding of the function of paid search, it is important to understand how bidding works, what quality signals represent, and how an advertisement relates to user intent.
What Is Paid Search?
Paid search is an example of digital advertising that allows businesses to display advertisements on the individual results page of a search engine after paying for their placement. These advertisements are based on specific search terms and are usually located either at the top or bottom of the individual organic results. Paid search uses a pay-per-click (PPC) payment method, meaning advertisers will only be charged when a customer clicks on their advertisement. Consequently, the use of digital advertising via paid search is most useful for capturing customers’ intent when searching. Additionally, advertisers can adjust their budgets, control the audiences they want to reach, and customize their advertisements based on the objectives they want to achieve.
How Google Ads Works
The way Google advertises is via an auction-based method that relies on the selection of keywords chosen by the advertiser to decide the order in which ads will be displayed when users search using those keywords. Although advertisers may place a dollar value on their bids for the selected keywords, that is not the only consideration when determining the placement of advertisements. Rather, Google uses multiple criteria (including the amount of the bid, the relevance of the ad, and the experience a user has with the landing page to calculate the “Ad Rank”, according to Google [38]). Thus, the Google advertising service encourages businesses to create suitable, pertinent advertisements for their customers above those businesses that may be spending significantly more on advertising. In a previous discussion in class, we discussed how this benefits end-users by providing them with relevant advertisements that correspond closely with their search intent.
Quality Score and Ad Rank
Quality Score, as defined by Chaffey and Ellis-Chadwick (2019), is one of the key factors that determine how well an ad will perform in Google Ads by how much it costs and how visible it is. Quality Score is determined by three factors: ad relevance, expected click-through rate, and ad experience on the landing page of an advertiser’s webpage. A higher Quality Score can lead to a lower cost per click as well as a better ad position, therefore advertisers need to make sure that keywords match their ads and the page where a user would land after clicking through an ad. From a strategic standpoint, Quality Score gives advertisers an incentive to improve the user experience and not just bid aggressively to get their ads shown, thus making paid search more efficient and user-oriented.
Intent-Driven Ad Alignment
Search engine marketing (SEM) can provide marketers with the tools they need to create highly effective ad campaigns. SEM requires marketers to understand where their target audience is in their purchasing process to create an effective SEM campaign. Campaigns that focus on transactional or commercial intent keyword searches are generally the most effective, as users performing these types of searches are closer to making a purchase decision. Marketers can analyze user search intent to determine the best way to allocate budget and create targeted ads that meet their audience’s needs. Additionally, aligning user search intent with ad campaigns improves ROI while minimizing disruption to users by providing relevant information to assist in their purchase decisions.
Advantages and Limitations of Paid Search
The immediacy of paid search is one of the largest benefits when compared to SEO, as SEO takes time to produce results through organic traffic, while Google Ads provide almost instant traffic generation. Paid search also provides a large volume of performance data that allows continual optimization of campaigns, but once you stop spending, all results will cease, therefore, it is not a sustainable marketing strategy by itself; costs can also increase for all AdWords advertisers in more competitive industries. Because of this, course materials have emphasized that paid search works best in conjunction with organic SEO and should be used as part of a larger marketing strategy.
Conclusion
Using Google Ads as a Paid Search Marketing platform supports businesses in connecting with high-value customers and generating measurable success. By using keywords and targeting specific consumer intent when creating ad campaigns, companies can compete effectively with other advertisers in search results. The speed and flexibility of paid search can be maximized when combined with an ongoing organic search program. Marketers can create better-performing Google Ads by understanding how Google Ads works, and using those principles to create an overall cost-effective, relevant, and performance-driven campaign within their overall digital marketing strategy.
References
- Chaffey, D., & Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2019). Digital marketing: Strategy, implementation and practice (7th ed.). Pearson Education.
- Fishkin, R., & Høgenhaven, T. (2015). Inbound marketing and SEO: Insights from the Moz blog. Wiley.
- Google. (2023). How Google Ads works. Google Ads Help Center. https://ads.google.com/home/how-it-works/