Search ads are one of the highest quality paid traffic sources as it is uniquely intent driven and user initiated. People are more likely to take action when they are actively searching vs. browsing (people are banner blind!).
There are 19 “traction channels” available but when you are looking at paid channels to explore, search is a great place to start if you are looking for a good ROI or ROAS (return on ad spend). It’s not uncommon to see ROI over 100% and an ROAS of 250%.
Key benefits of running a Paid Search Campaign
- More control over what the users see in search results (compared to SEO).
- Get discovered when people are searching for a product or service relevant to your business (users have high intent).
- Cost-Per-Click (CPC) bidding means pay only when your ad gets clicked.
- It’s cost effective to help you get leads, sales and/or calls = NEW CUSTOMERS (yes you can track these conversions!).
- Start with any size budget (even $1/day).
- Tons of targeting options (age, gender, device, household income and geo location) and hundreds of additional segments.
- Measurable results with a lot of transparency.
- Valuable reports to help pinpoint success.
What does a successful Search Ads Campaign look like?
It depends on your goal, but it should be based on the key performance indicator (KPI) that matters MOST to the growth of your business. Ensure it’s something you can track and measure such as leads, downloads, calls or sales.
Often, the focus is driving sales with an ROI/ROAS goal and then optimizing a campaign off that. Both Google and Microsoft Ads have built-in tools to run a campaign with a conversion goal that works for this.
Examples of Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s):
- Get an average click-through-rate of 10%.
- Get 20 valid calls or leads each month.
- Get 500 targeted new users to engage with your site.
- Have at least 50% impression share for your keywords.
- Get specific return on investment (ROI) goal of 75%.
- Get specific return on ad spend (ROAS) goal of 185%.
Tracking Important Signals
Many of our clients are focused on Direct-To-Consumer (D2C) sales and one of the things that surfaces in strategy talks is how to identify and track the right types of actions and goals on your site in order to make better business decisions. Google Analytics is the most common platform we see being used for reports, so we’ll be referencing their product for the rest of this post (but the same types of goals and events are important regardless of the platform you use).
Even though the emphasis is on sales, it’s important to measure micro conversions that happen at your store. These are actions taking place on your website by potential customers that signal interest in your products.
They might not be ready to buy yet but you’ve got their attention and they took one of these actions…
- Account signup
- Newsletter signup
- Time on site (5 minutes or more)
- Viewed a product page or “added to cart”
- Live Chat sessions
- Contact form submission
- Downloaded an ebook or file
- Watched a video
- Conducted a search on your site
Micro conversions can be tracked in several ways.
You can set most of these as goals and/or events in Google Analytics. This way, you’ll be able to run various reports with segments for demographics, locations, devices, traffic source, campaigns or landing pages and see which goals and events are being triggered, how often and then focus on activities that lead to sales.
Interested in learning more? Want a free initial consultation or audit?
Reach out to us on our contact form and we’ll be happy to give you a free audit on your campaigns. Adfluent is a Google Partner, which means we meet all the criteria (certifications, volume and best practices) and we have access to a Google Rep to make sure we have an extra set of internal eyes to maximise success.