Planning and Setting Up a Search Advertising Campaign »

We’re nearly at the end of our discussion for Search Advertising. Only two more articles left, and we’re ready to move on to new, and equally-exciting topics about digital marketing. For the time being, we will discuss planning and setting up a search advertising campaign.

In this article, we will give you some incredible tips for your search advertising campaign. Check them out below.

Tips for Planning and Setting Up A Search Advertising Campaign

Tip #1 – Do Your Homework

Homeworks are not just for school. This includes a study of the full online and offline analysis of your business. You also need to understand customer demographics and competitors.

Yes, you can easily set up a advertising campaign without going through all of these, but it pays to do your research. Remember that in search advertising, you only get three lines to get your point across.

This means that you need to make sure that those three lines make an impact and actually speaks to customers to convert.

Tip #2 – Set Goals

Goals are important in life, and it is also crucial in the game of search advertising. In this industry, you need to set up a clear goal of what you want to achieve with each campaign. Ask yourself what you want your sers to do once they click on your ad? Why did you start the campaign in the first place?

Tip #3 – Set Up a Budget

Now that you have your goal, you need to figure out how much you are willing to spend in order to achieve that said goal? You also need to figure out your cost per action, or CPA. Set up a different budget for each goal.

Tip #4 – Do your Keyword Research

We have discussed the importance of keyword research time and time again. We have given a complete guide in reference to this in our article SEO and Key Phrases, as well as Optimising Content for Key Phrases.

Keywords are what your potential customers use when they search the internet for a service that you offer. You also need to make a list of the common misspellings of the keywords, and etc.

Additionally, you also need to do research at the expected volume for your keywords. This will give you a better insight on how to bid for these keywords or key phrases. There are a lot of different tools available online that you can use for this. We will discuss more of that later.

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Tip #5 – Write Impactful Adverts

Now it is time to move on to writing the adverts. Once you are finished with your keyword research, you can start writing compelling, impactful advertisements to promote the service or the product that you offer.

You can make advertisements unique for each keyword, or you also have the option to group them and have multiple keywords in one advertisement. The choice is up to you.

However, it is important to keep in mind that you use an appropriate display URL for every ad. And that you target the landing page for each ad.

Tip #6 – Placing Your Bids

You have set up your goals, done your keyword research, and wrote your adverts. Now what? Well now, it is time to place your bids for those keywords.

You can set the maximum bids for your keywords at this stage. If you are just starting out, do not set the bid too high. Start low, check the progress, and tweak each bid as your campaign progresses.

However, do not start with bids that are too low. Bids that are too low won’t get too much traffic and will cause search engines to give you a low Quality Score.

The key is testing your ad to find the right balance that is in line with your goals.

Tip #7 – Tracking

Now, it is time to get your tracking tags in position. This is most important on any conversion tracking tags.

Tip #8 – Measure, Analyze, Test, and Optimize

Now that you have the tracking tags in place, you can finally analyze your return on investment or ROI down to a keyword level.

After that, you can see which keywords are converting the most, and you can focus your campaign and your budget on those. It is also worth a try to change some of the advertisement’s elements such as the image, the text, or the video to see if that will increase the click-through rate or CTR.

You can even split-test different landing pages just to see which one converts the most. Not only that, but you can test the networks, too. Some of the campaigns may perform on Bing, while some may convert better on Google.

The main takeaway is to keep your goals in mind and work your best to achieve them.

Tools To Help You Better

As we said, keyword research is important. It is the main foundation of search marketing campaigns. Fortunately, keyword research doesn’t necessarily have to be complicated or time-consuming.

There are a lot of different tools out there that can help you with this specific task. With these tools, you can create, grow, test your keyword list and determine keyword volumes.

We have compiled a list of tools that will help you in this department better. Check them out below.

Keyword Suggestion Tools

Keyword Volume TOols

You can also use Google AdWords for ad previews. They have an Ad Preview Tool that allows you to check whether your ad is appearing on the page. Go to this page to know more about this tool.

You can also use Google Trends to see the keyword search volume over time. Visit Google Trends here.

Keep in mind that these tools should be used as just guidelines. Usually, these tools provide trends and estimates, but not specific values for each keyword. What you can do is test the data with your own campaign to determine which works best for you.