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Paid Advertising
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By Cory Miller
Content Marketing Manager
Table of Contents
1
A Very, Very Brief History of Paid Advertising
2
What is Paid Advertising?
3
Starting Simple with Search Ads
4
Getting Flashy with Display Ads
5
Becoming the Hunter with Retargeting
6
Conclusion
1
A Very, Very Brief
History of Paid Advertising
P
aid advertising has a lot of aliases, sort of like an
international spy. It goes by paid search, digital
advertising, SEM, PPC, AdWords, display ads, banner
ads – yada, yada yada. We like the term paid advertising,
so we’re going to stick with that. Although digital marketing
is a relatively new marketing space for small businesses,
paid advertising is actually over 20 years old. In 1993,
Global Network Navigator, an online information portal,
was the first commercial website to sell a clickable ad. The
pioneering client was the law firm Heller Ehrman White &
McAuliffe. I wonder how they’re doing now? Within two
years, GNN had Mastercard and Zima paying big bucks for
ad spots. GNN was quickly acquired by a little company
called AOL and the rest, as they say, is history.
We’re leaving out an insane amount of detail and recklessly simplifying a complicated story filled with risk taking,
ingenuity and revolutionary breakthroughs. But this isn’t
history class, so we’ll get on with it.
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Fast forward 20 years. AdWords, Google’s proprietary
paid advertising platform, is annually generating over 50
billion dollars in revenue for the colorful tech giant. This
accounts for over 90 percent of Google’s total revenue. That
was quick.
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2
What is Paid Advertising?
T
he easiest way to explain paid advertising is with
its cost-per-click payment model. When a searcher
enters a search query into a search engine (the
searcher searched the sea shores for sea shells) your ad
will display. The searcher sees your ad, clicks on it and is
taken to your website. Your account is then charged for that
click. Boom, paid advertising.
While this might seem like a fast track to bankruptcy,
it’s not. Paid advertising is not the Wild West. There are
many mechanisms in place to assure that your daily and
monthly budgets are fixed. You can also be assured you’re
only paying for qualified leads. In other words, Joe Schmo
from down the street can’t click on your ad 100 times in a
row and suddenly there are debt collectors ringing your
phone. This is paid advertising. There are rules.
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When used properly, paid advertising is a fantastic
tool to generate new leads. However, that’s not to say
anyone can and should do it. Like a lot of things in life, paid
advertising is best handled by a certified expert. Staying
at a Holiday Inn Express last night does not qualify you to
manage a paid advertising campaign. Let’s look at some
different branches of paid advertising, how they work and
the unique benefits that each have.
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3
Starting Simple with
Search Ads
S
earch ads are the most common form of paid advertising. These are the text ads that populate the top
and right side of a search engine results page (SERP).
Search ads are an effective form of advertising because
of the incredibly high volume of traffic that search engines
receive. Over 190 million people use Google every month,
making over 100 billion searches. Not all search ads are
created equal. Google, Bing and other search engines allow
you to customize and enhance search ads with different
formats and extensions that supply searchers with additional information.
But how do search ads work on a local level? If you
run a small auto body shop in Columbus, Ohio, you don’t
want to pay for clicks coming from northern Montana. Paid
advertising platforms, like AdWords, provide you with the
ability to completely customize every aspect of your ad
campaign, which can be complicated. To demonstrate this,
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let’s look at a few of the most common mistakes that we
see when businesses are self-managing a paid advertising
campaign.
Keywords: The biggest mistake that do-it-yourselfers
make is in the construction of the keyword list. The fundamental idea behind a pay-per-click model is that every click
should come from a potential prospect. However, if you
don’t understand the complexities and uses of keyword
match type, then you’re likely paying for clicks you don’t
want.
Keywords have different match type choices: broad
match, broad match modifier, phrase match, exact match
and negative match. Each keyword in your campaign must
have a set match type. Without ample experience, it’s very
easy to select poor keywords, assign ineffective match
types and ultimately pay for clicks from non-relevant
traffic.
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Location: As we alluded to earlier, another mistake we
often see is the geographic location in which a paid advertising campaign is running. Location targeting allows your
ads to appear in specific geographic locations. Locations
include countries, regions, cities, postal codes and the radius
around a target.
Additionally, you can add location exclusions to
increase click rates. This will prevent your ad from running
in certain parts of your targeted area. A location exclusion
could be used if you’re running a special promotion that isn’t
eligible in certain parts of your targeted area.
Scheduling: To reiterate, you only want to pay for
clicks that could potentially lead to a conversion. Because
of this, many businesses only want ads to show during
business hours. This makes sense if your main goal is to
receive phone calls. By default, AdWords campaigns are
set to “Show ads all days and hours.” If you don’t want
calls at 3:00 a.m. on Friday then proper ad scheduling is
important.
You can select specific days and specific hours to turn
your campaign on and off. Additionally, you can adjust your
bid (how much you’re willing to pay for a click) for certain
times of the day or week. If you’ve noticed a low number
of conversions on Mondays, you can set a bid adjustment
of -20% for your max cost per click (CPC), which lowers the
amount you’re willing to pay for clicks on that day.
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4
Getting Flashy with
Display Ads
A
nother branch of paid advertising is display. Display
ads are the banner images you see on third-party
websites. Display ads provide your paid advertising
campaign with unique benefits that search ads alone
cannot.
Display ads appear on the Google Display Network.
The Display Network is a collection of websites that show
AdWords ads. The network also includes mobile sites
and apps. The Display Network is quite vast. With millions
of websites, news pages and blogs, the Display Network
reaches 90 percent of Internet users worldwide. Websites
like Weather.com, Business Insider and Food Network are
all part of Google’s Display Network. Display ads can take
the form of text ads, image ads, rich media and video ads.
Branding is one of the most powerful benefits of display ads. In fact, consumers that are exposed to display ads
are 155 percent more likely to perform a branded search for
that business. Display ads are the billboards of the digital
world. And when exercising a cost-per-click model, you’re
not actually paying for the residual branding value that
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display ads are providing your business with. Display ad
clicks are also significantly cheaper than traditional search
ad clicks. Display ad clicks are typically less than one dollar,
while search ad cost-per-click greatly varies.
Display advertising also offers new strategies for
targeting potential consumers. One of the most common
methods is called contextual targeting. Contextual targeting is the process that matches ads to relevant sites in
the Display Network using keywords or topics. Basically,
Google’s system analyzes and indexes the content of
each webpage to determine its central theme. Google will
then use your campaign’s keywords, topic selections and
location targeting (among other factors) to select appropriate placements for your ads. Contextual targeting will
improve the likelihood that an audience is interested in your
business.
For the more adventurous sort, Google will also let
you choose the specific sites or pages where you want
your ad to show. This is called managed placements. Unlike
other targeting methods, where your ads are automatically
placed on sites for you, managed placements provide you
with complete control over which webpages your ads will
appear on.
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Managed placements are only recommended after
you’ve archived some campaign history. Perhaps you’ve
noticed that your ad is performing really well on a certain
website. You may decide to focus more of your budget on
these particular pages.
Of course, the best route may be to do a little of both.
With contextual targeting (automatic placements), Google
will likely discover new websites and pages that are great
fits for your business. You can then use managed placements to ensure that your ads are always running on the
best performing sites.
While display is a great addition to your paid advertising campaign, there’s another strategy that takes its
effectiveness one step further. Meet retargeting – display
advertising’s big brother.
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Banner Ads Shapes & Sizes
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5
Becoming the Hunter
with Retargeting
R
etargeting, also referred to as remarketing, is the
strategy of specifically targeting people who have
previously visited your website but didn’t convert. For
example, you just visited our website http://www.revlocal.
com/ to download this super awesome marketing guide.
Later, as you browse the Internet you may notice a few of
our beautifully designed display ads popping up around
you. This is retargeting.
The first step in setting up a retargeting campaign
is to add a retargeting tag to your website. This is a small
snippet of code that’s generated in your AdWords account.
After the retargeting tag has been added to your website
(usually in the header or footer), you’re ready to start
building a retargeting list.
A retargeting list is built with cookies. No, seriously.
Less appetizing than your grandmother’s chocolate chip
cookies – Internet cookies are a small text files that are
saved on the hard disk of a user’s computer. Cookies are
given a bad rap, but they’re far from malicious. Cookies
allow websites to store information and preferences about
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their visitors. For example, if you visit a website with a retargeting tag it will assign you a unique visitor ID and save
it as a cookie. To the website, the cookie says, “Hey! I’ve
been here before!”
A website can only access information that it stores
on your device. Websites cannot access your personal
information or any sort of off-site browsing behavior.
Websites uses cookies in different ways, but generally,
cookies are used to improve user experience. For example,
cookies are used to track purchases and promote related
items. Websites also use cookies to provide you with more
relevant content based your specified preferences – location, pages visited, etc.
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To actually flip on your retargeting campaign you
need to collect at least 100 cookies over the last 30 days.
In other words, you need to have 100 unique visitors to
your website per month. This is quite achievable for most
websites. After you’ve hit this threshold you can start advertising to visitors after they leave your website. Typically,
retargeting is most effective when using display ads on
Google’s Display Network.
Retargeting has some significant advantages over
search and display advertising. Approximately 98 percent
of website visitors don’t convert the first time they visit.
Some visitors may be conducting research and are not
ready to buy. Others may not be impressed with what
you’re offering. Regardless of their reason, it’s very rare
for a visitor to convert at first sight (unlike love). With this in
mind, we can assume that a website visitor will continue to
browse elsewhere while looking for a product of service.
This is why retargeting is so important. It extends the
buying atmosphere.
The Grass Whacker Example: A Lesson in Retargeting
Retargeting is especially valuable when a consumer’s buying cycle is a bit longer. Let’s look at a quick
example to demonstrate the advantage of retargeting.
It’s late February. You’re in the market for a new lawn
mower before spring because of an unfortunate incident
that happened last August. You’ve budgeted to spend
about $350.00, so you want to make sure you’re buying a
quality product. Before walking into a store, you conduct a
sufficient amount of research to narrow down your choices.
Within 15 miles of you, there are ten retailers that sell lawn
mowers. While researching, you browse your way through
the websites of most of these retailers comparing brands,
prices and warranty plans.
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You’ve settled on particular model, the Grass Whacker
3000, which is carried by six of the ten retailers. Only one
of these retailers, Big John’s House of Mowers, has added
a remarketing tag to its website. Because of this, Big John
can stand out from the competition by directly advertising
the particular model you’re interested in while creating
serious brand recognition. Just like that, Big John has the
upper hand.
Retargeting is a smart way to advertise to your website
visitors because it considers their particular actions, which
creates a smarter advertising strategy. While you can keep
it simple and create a general retargeting list, you can also
create more specific lists for people who visited a certain
page or group of pages. In the example above, Big John
created a retargeting list for people who visited the pages
of the top five most popular mowers. Additionally, Big John
created a high-value user filter for people who visited one
of these five pages at least three times.
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6
Conclusion
W
e’ve only scratched the surface of paid
advertising, but hopefully you have a better
understanding of the “what” and the “why.” Paid
advertising is an extremely powerful form of lead generation when it’s used properly. While this marketing guide is
created as an educational tool, we highly suggest that you
let a professional (like us) manage your paid advertising
campaign. Our team of Google and Bing certified experts
live and breathe paid advertising. By managing a high
volume of paid advertising accounts, we’ve been able to
gather industry insights that have dramatically increased
the quality and effectiveness of our client’s campaigns.
Also, we want to point out that paid advertising is most
effective when it’s part of a comprehensive digital marketing strategy. We recommend that you don’t put all your
eggs in one basket. When it comes to digital marketing it’s
best to diversify your efforts. Paid advertising is certainly
capable of playing the leading role, but it still needs a supporting cast to improve the quality of the entire production.
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Who is RevLocal? First and foremost, RevLocal is
your Internet marketing partner. We offer our clients
something that our competitors can’t - relationships.
We grow as you grow. We change as the Internet
changes. We’re an extension of your marketing
department - a really useful extension. We embrace
the challenges that Internet marketing poses for
small businesses. We will do whatever it takes
to help your business get found online. Call us
your partner, your consultant, your strategist, your
marketing department or even your web guru.
We’re not picky.
revlocal.com
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Ready to Get Started?
As a business owner, it’s up to you to decide what story
you’re going to tell. Consumers will judge a book by
its digital cover. Don’t be stubborn when it comes to
marketing. Be willing to make changes to your strategy.
Don’t settle for average, because an average marketing
strategy will yield average results. Business is truly a
survival of the fittest. If you continue to adapt, you will be
rewarded.
START ‘ER UP!
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