How SEM Benefits Your Business
Why Is SEM Important?
SEM or Search Engine Marketing is paid marketing using search engine marketing tools like Google Ads.
The danger to Google ads, or any PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Ad format is that if you don’t optimise your Ads correctly you could spend a fortune on Ad Spend with no real results.
Search Engine Marketing can generate a ton of new business when used correctly. The biggest benefit to SEM when fully optimised is that it literally becomes a money printing machine. i.e. for every $1 you spend you receive $2 profit.
How Do I Get The Most From My Ad Spend?
In order to avoid the money pit that can be Pay Per Click ads you need to know how to navigate the platform you’re using. We use Google Ads for all our Search Engine Marketing because Google is the largest platform, but there are other platforms such as Bing Ads that you can use.
Here are our tips for getting the most from your ad spend;
- Start Small. By starting with a small budget you can avoid the risk of paying an arm and a leg for ads you don’t get results from.
- Split Test Audiences. When setting up your audiences set apart one audience from another by changing one differential only.
- Split Test Ads. Create several different ads, with different ad copy and images then split test these.
- Delete/Stop. Delete or pause the ads that aren’t working and use the ad spend to increase ad spend on the ones that are.
- Split Test Some More.
- Have A Clear Funnel. By this I mean use your ads to walk your customers through the ad experience. Lure them in at the top of the funnel with value and don’t try to sell to them until you know they’re genuinely interested.
- Landing Pages. Make sure you’re sending the viewer to the relevant landing page.
- Keywords. Use the right keywords in your Ad group.
- Negative Keywords. These are important!
- Ad Extensions. Use as many ad extensions that are relevant to your ad.
What Are Keywords & Negative Keywords?
A keyword is a word or search phrase that you want your ad to show for. For example if you wanted to show your ad for your dog grooming parlour you would use keywords such as “Dog” or “Dog Grooming”.
A negative keyword is a word or phrase that you don’t want your ad to show up for. Using our example above a negative keyword would be “cat” as you don’t want someone who’s searching for cat related products or services to be shown your ad.
You also want to show up for keywords that are actually being searched for. Using tools like Google’s Keyword Planner can really help decide what keywords to use.
What Are The Benefits To SEM?
As briefly mentioned above, if you can optimise your ad campaign efficiently you’re essentially creating a money printing machine.
What I mean by this is simple. When you have an ad running and you’re paying for example $1000 a month, but the work or sales its producing is generating a profit, then why stop the ad? If an ad is working and you’re making money from the ad spend you’ve made yourself a money tree.
If someone were to offer you $10 for every $5 you have, how much would you give them?
What Are The Cons To SEM?
As many, many people have found out, Pay-Per-Click ads are difficult to optimise. A lot of the time business owners assume that if they set up a basic ad and pay money their money the phone will start ringing and orders will come flooding in. This is not the case. PPC ads need to be optimised and tweaked until you’re getting the best results for your ad spend.
You can spend a lot of money on PPC ads if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Another myth to bust is that although you will get faster results compared to SEO, you won’t see results straight away from a new Ad campaign. I say to clients that if we’re creating a new Ad you need to allow 4 weeks of tweaking and optimising before you start seeing results. If you break even in the first 4-6 weeks you’ve done well.
If you’d like some help with your Google Ads then contact us today.
