Paid search marketing is one of the most common ways of advertising on the web today, and retailers collectively spend billions of dollars on this type of advertising each year. However, many companies, and possibly your company, may not understand the things they need to do in order to make paid search more effective for them. Without knowing how to make the most out of paid search, those ads could actually have very little effect on your bottom line, and that’s the last thing you want to hear when you are spending your marketing dollars there. Here are some of the things you can do to make better use of your paid search options.
Develop a Targeted Marketing Campaign
Instead of simply using keywords, which you will still need, naturally, you should make sure to target your paid search campaign toward your ideal customers. Make sure the information in the ad is relevant to your ideal customer. In addition, you have to make sure that the landing page the prospective buyer goes to after clicking meets their expectations. Deliver on what you promise in the ad, otherwise, you will not convert the customer and make a sale. When you structure your ads and landing pages to match, and to provide the customer with exactly what they expect, you can start to see greater effectiveness from paid search ads.
The landing page and the site layout for your ecommerce store should match as well. Branding is a huge part of sale conversion. When customers see a unified branding message from the paid search ad to the landing page and on through to the rest of your site, it actually bolsters their confidence in your business.
When customers come to your landing page, you may find that offering them some type of incentive to buy from you can go a long way in converting them. For example, you could offer free or discounted shipping.
Product Listing Ads Are Important
While text ads are still the most popular and prevalent option, PLAs are starting to gain ground. These sorts of ads can more quickly gain the attention of potential customers for a couple of reasons. They are different from text ads, and people have not yet become desensitized to them. Additionally, these ads have pictures with them, along with the price and the store name. They are simpler than a text ad, and they tell the customer everything they need to know – what the item is, what it looks like, how much it is, and where to click to get it. As customers grow more accustomed to these ads, they could start to gain more ground over the simple paid search text ads.
Consider Extensions
In some cases, you may be able to add extensions to your advertisements. These can let you add images, pages, click to call buttons and more information than a mere text advertisement. If they are an option, you may want to consider using them.
Summary: Companies around the world spend billions of dollars annually on paid search in the hopes that they can drive up the number of customers who buy from them. It is important to understand how to create good ads and PLAs for paid search, but converting goes much deeper than that. Once someone clicks and heads to the landing page, they need to have a reason to stay there and buy from you rather than from one of your competitors. Understanding how to use paid search by developing a targeted marketing campaign really does have the potential to help you to convert more sales.
Resource: http://www.inc.com/jon-morris/paid-search-and-e-commerce-4-things-you-should-know.html