Tip 20: Use the Digital Billboard

Search engine advertising and pay per click

Pay per click and search engine advertising are beneficial tools to generate highly targeted traffic for your website. When using a search engine to find specific information you will often see paid for listings first. In modern iterations of search engines, these look very much like the natural  listings. 

While you can use SEO to appear in the natural listings, you cannot optimise naturally for every search term that you might want to use for targeting or you may find that there is a lot of natural competition for particular search terms. This is when you should turn to pay-per-click. In order to create the most traffic to your page, promotions and adverts should be used. The content written for these adverts should be engaging and well written. You want to address your target market directly, advertising aspects of your business you think people would be most interested in. Google is the main search advertising platform that we recommend using as they are the market leader with over 87% of searches occuring using google. The google search engine advertising or adwords provides a range of excellent tools to allow marketers to personalise advert content for specific audiences. 

Research is a key part of establishing your digital advertising strategy. You should conduct your own competitor analysis to establish what digital competition you are facing for your target market and search terms. If they have used certain keywords, phrases or promotions, it can help you know what to avoid and what to duplicate. Keyword research in general will also help you to define the most effective keyword selection by exploring the typical search volumes that certain long tail and standard keywords achieve on google and other search engines as well as the typical cost range per click.

You also need to define your audience, you want those visiting your page to respond positively to your promotions, products and services. Analyse your current customer base, who they are and why they are interested in your product, you can then adapt your adverts and promotions to aim towards your desired market. You should monitor your traffic and then adapt your ads to ensure you are reaching the correct market. You can set up highly tailored audiences for your promotions who can be segregated by age, location and other demographic and interest based data. Mirroring your actual customer base is always a good start and you can also test a range of audiences and their response to particular advertising content and mechanisms.

When running your ads and promotions, you should use AB testing. This essentially creates more than one variant of a page and statistical analysis is used to determine which variation performs better. You can then use this data to work out which ads are getting the best response and are more popular with your market. With this in mind, it is important to continually monitor and change your ads to ensure optimal performance and use of the budget allocated.