Creating Effective Search Campaigns

There are many things which can make your search campaigns effective. However, I’d like to cover my top 5 tips to ensure you’re maximising your chance of a successful campaign.

When it comes to search campaigns. It’s key that you have a clear, structured plan from the outset. The more detailed your plan, the more accurate you can begin to scale your campaigns with the data they receive.

Tip 1.

What Do You Want To Achieve?

Before you begin the building process, its important that you have your end goal in mind. Whether that’s an increase in sales, increase in leads or just general awareness.

Once you’ve laid out what your end goal is, it’s time to get down to the details. From search campaigns, the idea is to incrementally increase performance as time goes on. And this can only be achieved with regular optimisation and a great analytical eye.

If you’d like more details on how to optimise your campaigns then head over to our PPC blog page for more info.

Tip 2.

Who Is Your Target Audience?

The next step and arguably the most important, who is your target audience and what would they like to see on the search network in order to encourage them to buy or get in touch.

Things to think about when defining your audience;

• Age
• Gender
• Tone of voice
• Unique selling points

For example, If you own a female-only gym wear brand. There’s no point in equally advertising to both men and women. It would make much more sense to use bid modifiers to limit the search volume via the male demographic. However, just because its a female dominant brand, that doesn’t mean men won’t want to buy it for their partners. For example, the focus could be switched around black Friday, Cyber Monday & Christmas, as the male demographic search intent changes due to the likelihood of them wanting to buy gifts. That’s why its key to review this on a monthly basis.

Age, another huge factor when defining your audience. Not only would age come into play for most industries from a conversion point of view. But it can also go hand in hand with the tone of voice you use in your ads.

For example, with ISAWITFIRST. They often use common slang which will match the demographic they’re targeting. Thus improving relevance and increasing engagement.

Unique selling points can dramatically affect your conversion rate, that’s why identifying the most relevant USP’s to your audience will give you the best chance of converting. For example, users who are searching for products of low value may prefer discounts & buy one get one free deals etc. Whereas the target audience of a luxury watch manufacturer may look for USP’s of a more premium nature.

Tip 3.

What Budget Are You Allocating?

Often, companies tend to think the bigger the budget, the better the campaign. And fortunately for some, that’s not the case.

Once you’ve chosen which campaigns you’re going to run with, and the keyword research is complete.

It’s imperative that you outline a budget which is able to meet the search volume demands of the keywords in the campaigns. For example, if you want to feature for generic keywords with a high CPC, it’s key that you keep these keywords in their own campaign with their own budget to avoid them spending the entire campaign’s budget, which would result in little to no visibility for the less generic, longer tail keywords.

Whilst there are ways in which you can fine-tune your spend via device, ad scheduling, location & demographic bid adjustments. It’s still key that yourself, or your agency, does the number-crunching to ensure you’re able to achieve enough visibility for your budget in order for you to compete with your competitors.

Tip 4.

Who are your competitors?

Identifying your competitors will help you highlight areas in which you can improve, as well as areas in which you can shout about. For example, if your competitor is doing free delivery when you spend £100, You could potentially do free delivery and entry into our prize draw when you spend £50 or more.

These sorts of reactive USP’s can often sway users to choose one brand over another.

Another positive in identifying your competitors is a competitor search campaign. Bidding on your competitors brand name is a great way to put yourself alongside your competitors using their brand traffic.

These campaigns are great for brand visibility, and when done efficiently with some arm twisting unique selling points, can prove very effective in “stealing” your competitor’s customers.

Tip 5.

Enjoy The Process!

For me, this is the most important factor in creating effective search campaigns.

Not being too disheartened if something doesn’t yield the right results if anything, its key to the learning process.

All failed attempts are crucial when it comes to search campaigns. I can definitely say I’ve learnt more from those failed attempts than I have from successful campaigns.

As long as you re-review where you could’ve gone wrong or why things didn’t work, I’m sure your next search campaign will be a great success.

So there we have it! My top 5 tips for creating effective search campaigns.