What is a search engine campaign?

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the practice of marketing a business through paid advertising that appears on search engines results pages, or SERPs. Like a traditional ad campaign, a search engine campaign strategically places ads on related searches. Google Ads is one platform that you can use for an ad campaign, and it’s free to set up, but you pay per click. If users click your ad, you will pay a fee, but you can set up how much you want to spend per day. 

What to include in your campaign

When you’re ready to launch your campaign, you’ll want to be sure you’ll reach and attract an audience that will want to use your product or service. As Google is the dominant search engine out there, with 2.5 million searches every second, it is where we recommend setting up your advertisement campaign, to reach your potential customers.

– Before you begin, determine what your selling goal for the next month, quarter, or year will be. Then determine how much you can spend per day, per click. Remember: You only pay Google per click, but you want to be sure your profit is greater than what you are paying out for advertising.

– Use Google’s Smart Bidding to help figure out your budget, track effectiveness of your campaigns, and set up broad match keywords. Here is a handy guide on bidding strategies to help optimize your options.

– Take the time to make sure your ad is high quality, Google will assess every ad and give it a quality ranking from 0 to 10. The higher the ranking, the better chance you have for conversion, or an interaction with your advertisement.

– Choose keywords wisely. Words that are too broad like “restaurants,” will pull up everything in the area, making it unlikely that someone will spot your growing business. However, if your specialty is Tex Mex with a great Happy Hour, add a long tail keyword: “Austin Tex Mex Happy Hour.”

– Make sure that not only are your advertisements slick and eye-catching, but that your website is up to date, attractive, and easy to navigate. See our blog post from last month for more tips about setting up your website.

– Optimize your ads, and let automation help guide your clicks. Use Google extensions and links to social media to push conversions, interactions, and ultimately traffic to your website.

– Finally, set up regular intervals to measure how effective your campaigns are and what changes might need to be made to reach your goals.