Components of a Search Engine Advertising Campaign

Target Audience

The first component of a Search Engine Advertising campaign is a clear understanding of your target audience. Many companies even produce detailed profiles to help the campaign team envision what these target individuals are searching for, how they search, what search keywords they use, and so on. Once you have worked out your target audience and what they are likely to be searching for, you can relate this back to what the company is offering.

Keywords

Keywords are what people are likely to use when they are searching for your kind of product or service online. When you do a PPC campaign, you put these target keywords into the appropriate Pay Per Click set-up tools, such as Adgroups in Google.

A company then needs to create specific web pages which answer the needs expressed in those keywords. For example, if a visitor is searching for ‘orchids’ they need to link directly to a page featuring orchids, not the home page of the business selling the orchids where they would have to continue searching to find orchids. These pages – where the visitor first arrives – need to be set up to capture and convert the visitor. If visitors do not immediately find what they are searching for, you will generally lose them to a competitor’s site.

Yahoo, which previously had a Search Engine Advertising package allowing advertisers to specify how much they wanted to pay, is now moving more closely to the Google-style auction process where advertisers compete for keywords by bidding for them. Competitors can outbid you for a keyword and force you to either re-bid or to select another keyword.
 

Planning

It is important to bid for keywords that relate to the audience’s desires and intentions, not just keywords for how your company names or describes its products and services. For example, people searching for ‘weight-loss classes in Melbourne’ need specific keywords, not keywords that are the name of a health club or gymnasium that are offering the classes.

A defined time period and budget needs to be set before commencing the campaign. Companies not familiar with Pay Per Click campaigns generally seek external advice at this stage. As Google offers Adwords as a primarily a self-service product (with support only available to very large accounts), you will need to seek external advice.

In summary, planning will involve all the important steps relevant to any major marketing campaign:

• Know the audience
• Set a budget
• Set targets and  measure results against those targets
• Understand the advertising mix and the value of Pay Per Click compared to other marketing channels. Continue to monitor results so you know where to keep spending money.

Lastly, because Pay Per Click is considered by many a new ‘cool’ tool to play with, companies need to be aware that time and money can be wasted while playing, especially if the results are not on-plan.