By now you know that you need to get your website to rank higher (ideally, appear on the first page) so that when a potential customer searches for your product or service, a search engine (such as Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo) can suggest your website to this potential customer. While one aspect of this is SEO (See: Link to Blog_1), another called search engine marketing (SEM) involves spending money to get people to your website. SEM is basically paid advertising.
How does paid advertising work?
To understand how paid advertising works, let’s try searching for say ‘ice cream’ on the search engine that you use (Google, if that is your preferred search engine). Even before the list of websites related to ‘ice cream’ appear, you will see a set of sponsored ads appear at the top of the page. These are in the form of a snippet of the map with listings of businesses related to ‘ice cream’ as well as text ads of business linked to ‘ice cream’. Now, you must notice that the ads somehow show results for localities where you live or work. How did this happen?! Well, the search engine (or Google in your case) takes location information as well as digs into your past search history to construct a profile of you as a user and then serves up the most relevant ads to you. Suppose, you click one of the ads served up, say of ‘Frozen Glace Ice Cream Parlour’, then ‘Frozen Glace Ice Cream Parlour’ will have to pay Google some money for bringing you to its website.
How much does paid advertising cost?
The model that we described just now is called the pay-per-click (PPC) model. Also note that ‘ice cream’ that you typed into the search box earlier is called a keyword. Different keywords have different cost. This cost is dynamic, meaning that the cost depends on how much demand there is from other businesses for the same keyword. For example, in summer, when many people are looking to buy ice cream, there is a higher demand for the keyword ‘ice cream’. As a result, this keyword is also more expensive during summer season than in winter. Suppose you are the only ‘ice cream business’ in town. This means that no other business wants to pay Google for the keyword ‘ice cream’. Suppose also that the neighbouring town has 10 ‘ice cream’ businesses each with its own website that it wants to promote on the internet. In this case, the keyword ‘ice cream’ will cost less in your town than in the neighbouring town.
While you now know how a keyword is priced, note that in the real word cost of a keyword is decided via a mechanism of bidding. (More about it later).
If I tell Google the keywords that I want to spend money on and spend the money, will I get more customer?
While deciding on the keywords and an ad budget are crucial steps, you also need to tell google who you want to target (called audience). This will help you get maximum return on your investment of time and money. There are various ways in which you (or your agency) can do the audience targeting. For example, you can tell Google to show your ad to ‘college students’ or ‘parents with young children’. This is supposing that ‘college students’ or ‘parents with young children’ are more likely to buy ‘ice cream’ than say ‘parents with older children’. Or you can tell Google that anyone who has searched for ‘dessert’ or ‘cold drink’ should be targeted with your ad. After all, ‘dessert’ and ‘cold drink’ are closely related to ‘ice cream’.
Is paid advertising relevant for my business?
If you have a business that can acquire customers via the internet, then you should actively consider paid advertising. There are businesses that spend crores of rupees every month on paid advertising. The nature of their business justifies such large paid advertising spends. However, there are plenty of small businesses that have monthly paid advertising budgets that run into much smaller sums of money. You have to evaluate if there is value for your business in spending money on paid advertising. We’d suggest that you work with an agency (such as our’s), try out digital marketing and see for yourself. A question below tell how to evaluate if paid advertising is working for you.
How can I start paid advertising for my business?
Paid advertising requires constant monitoring of the advertising expense, the effectiveness of that spend and making changes to achieve maximum return on investment. To create the ads and to run ad campaigns, you also need expertise in creating advertisements as well as a solid grasp of SEM. For example, what ads to run, when to run the ads, how long should an ad campaign run for, how many times should an ad appear to a potential customer. There are just some of the questions that an agency specialising in SEM will help you answer. This is why many businesses choose to engage the services of an agency proficient in SEM. In case you’d like to speak with us, we’d be happy to take you through our services. Contact us on <Contact Details>.
How do I know if paid advertising is working for me?
Good question. You should constantly monitor how well (or not well) your ad spend is doing. There are benchmark costs and clicks for specific industries and geographies that you should compare yourself to in order to know if this is working for you. When you work with an agency (such as our’s), do ask them to help you understand the paid advertising landscape for your specific context. They’d be happy to do so.