Without a doubt, there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about paid search marketing. Using the wrong tactics can waste time and money. While online marketing success can feel like a moving target, it’s more than possible to implement reliable paid search strategies to bring traffic to your business.
Avoid the Most Common Paid Search Mistakes
Launching Without Proper Testing
When you launch any type of ad campaign, including paid search, requires you to start small, test it a little, make adjustments, test some more, and then fully launch. If you go from zero to 60 too quickly (launching too fast), you’ll get haphazard results. It’s important not to ignore the testing and tracking aspects as you cultivate a viable marketing campaign.
The trick to doing this effectively is something marketers call A/B Testing. All this means is that you test a couple of different versions of your website or paid search campaign, and monitor which works better. You would evaluate the effectiveness by using objective metrics (or Key Performance Indicators) that reflect the goals of your search campaign. Examples include monitoring which version garners the most traffic, click-through rate (CTR), or how long customers remain on your website.
Ineffective Keyword Analysis
There are entire software packages and websites dedicated to keyword analysis. SEMRush is one of the more popular. If you’re not attentive to keyword analysis, your paid search efforts will struggle. You must do good qualitative and quantitative research on your keyword selection that reflects your business’ market. Especially for local service businesses (like automotive dealerships), this should include a strong emphasis on long-tailed keyword searches like “automobile dealership in New York.”
Weak Tracking Methods
By now, you know you need to keep track of what works and eliminate what doesn’t in your quest for conversions. This is a very comprehensive part of the job, though. It’s possible to have solid keywords, run good A/B testing, make interesting written copy, and still have poor CTR and conversion for some other reason. You can only diagnose and cure the problem if you track everything. This should go through the entire ad funnel or paid search campaign.
Once again, we recommend reaching out to us with any concerns over how to do paid search marketing correctly. Search algorithms change all the time, which makes it worth your investment to have effective marketing pros at your disposal. We can keep you abreast of all developments and practices regarding paid search and search engine optimization for your online business endeavors
DigiSphere Marketing helps small, medium, and large companies gain a better web presence with proven marketing strategies. We routinely help businesses that don’t have time to tackle all the technical aspects of advertising and web design. If you think that applies to you, please contact us at 1-800-807-3031.
