The Ultimate Guide
to Paid Media - Part I
Google Ads and PPC

As you do your keyword research, you need to identify a broad swath of keywords to target -- both short-tail to long-tail. If you want to drive clicks that have the best chance of converting, it’s important to select keywords that have high intent for what you’re offering, and long-tail variants often fit this description.

The most obvious variations of your keywords are most likely already very competitive (i.e. “buy car”) because everyone else is also bidding on them. This is where thinking creatively can be rewarding. Long-tail keywords (that aren’t already saturated) present a variety of opportunities with:

• Lower CPCs

  Lower competition means the clicks are cheaper

• Ad Copy

  If anyone is bidding on the long-tail variations, their ad copy is probably not as optimized as yours

• Commercial Intent

  More specific searches often have greater commercial intent and are farther down in the purchase further

Understanding your match types is also essential for successful keyword strategy. Match types are keyword settings that control what type of searches your ad will appear for. The four different types of match types are:

• Exact Match

  The exact keyword or close variants of the keyword

• Phrase Match

  The exact word-for-word phrase or close variants of the phrase

• Broad Match

  The exact keyword, other variants of the keyword, and similar topics as determined by Google. (This keyword setting will reach the widest range of users and is Google Ads default setting)

• Modified Broad Match

  Same as broad match, but allows your ad to only be shown for searches that also include the words you mark with a (+) sign

Strategically selecting keyword match types is essential in making sure you don’t show up for searches for which your products and services have no relevance. To simply target “car” in a broad match campaign could result in your ad being shown for search queries with intent as wide-ranging as, “Buy car,” “rent car,” “watch cars movie,” or “buy toy car.”

Showing irrelevant ads to users can also result in a lower Quality Score, which impacts your CPCs and your keyword bidding. Unless your goal is general awareness marketing, it's far better to find the specific keywords and phrases that your target audience is already using and design a hyper-targeted advertising campaign to those individuals. Your ads may get less impressions, but there is a good chance they will get far better clicks from users who actually might become qualified leads or potential customers.

Single Keyword Ad Groups (SKAGs)

When it comes to your campaign structure, you need to use Single Keyword Ad Groups. With SKAGs, you will only have one keyword per ad group, as well as accompanying ad copy that's highly relevant to that single keyword. Although it takes more work for your marketing teams, SKAGs are the most effective way to perfect your ad copy and landing pages to have the highest relevance to the user’s search query, helping improve your click-through-rate and conversion rate.

In order to design a successful campaign, you only want your ads to appear where your customers actually are. Google Ads allows you to target users by city, state, country, zip code, latitude/longitude, and even a radius around a location. If you understand where your target market is located, or you want to earn new customers from a specific region, geotargeting is the easiest way to direct your ad impressions to those specific audiences.

Geotargeting is key for local businesses or those business owners with a brick-and-mortar store, but it is also beneficial to national brands wanting to make their campaigns more efficient by blocking regions where lower-value clicks or less conversions come from. Google Ads also allows you to modify your bid amounts based on location, which is a very good strategy for ecommerce companies.

As you geotarget, keep in mind that IP geolocation is imprecise, especially on mobile. Unless the users have enabled location settings for Google, Google will make their best guess on location from IP address.

For Display and Video campaigns, Google allows you to set targeted bid adjustments for mobile devices, tablets, and desktop. Google Ads even allows businesses to target mobile users with specific device models or wireless networks.

Whether or not you use device type targeting will depend on how your target audience is searching for your product or services. Almost a third of all mobile searches are location-based, so a local or small business should definitely be utilizing this campaign setting.

As you refine your campaigns, look to your analytics to determine whether or not your conversion rates are better on certain devices. If so, you may want to create a campaign that specifically targets those devices. If you’re not sure how your target audience best finds you, look to the data to teach you and then optimize accordingly.

Ad extensions can be a great way to improve your site visibility and CTR simply by having more information about your company appear in the search results pages. Ads with multiple extensions often get more clicks and perform better. There is also no additional cost for ad extensions, meaning there's no good reason not to use them on a regular basis.

There are a variety of extensions that you can add to your Google Ads to bring more value, but Google won’t always show your extensions. Google requires a minimum Ad Rank for your extensions to show, and will only show them when their analytics determine it will benefit your performance.

When your keyword bidding does get you in the top spots though, ad extensions can improve your brand visibility and entice the user to click. I will just highlight the most common and beneficial extensions here, as well as clarify which work better for certain industries.

Location Extensions

Location extensions allow you to show your address, a map, as well as the users proximity to your location. They can also include a call extension so people can have your phone number and call directly from their mobile device. For any local business with a brick-and-mortar store, using this extension is one of the fastest ways to drive site traffic and foot traffic.

Call Extensions

Using call extensions is a good idea for businesses that take appointments, reservations, or where a phone call would be the next step in the sales funnel. Call extensions place your company phone number at the top of the ad, making it easy for users to call your business, particularly when they are searching for your services on a mobile device, as all they have to do is click your number to call.

Sitelink Extensions

Sitelink extensions take users to specific landing pages on your site. Because sitelink extensions allow you to supplement an ad with more information about your products and services, and at no additional cost, those advertisers on a small budget can get loads of value from maxing out sitelink extensions and including as many as they can. You can include five links to different landing pages on your site. The landing pages you choose though should still have relevance to the users search intent and be optimized for conversion.

Overall, sitelink extensions help your ad stand out from your competitors and can have a positive impact on many of your PPC metrics. Data shows that sitelinks can improve CTR by average of 10-20%, which in turn raises Quality Scores and reduces CPCs.

Structured Snippets Extensions

With structured snippets extensions, your ads take up more real estate on the page. This extension empowers you to add four additional headlines and descriptions. If you are targeting keywords with a more broad search intent, structured snippet extensions give you more opportunities to use ad copy to establish your brand’s relevance to the user’s needs.

You need to create a negative keyword list to prevent Google from showing your PPC ad for certain designated words or phrases. Using negative keywords can help improve your ad relevance, boost Quality Score, and keep your ads from getting low-quality clicks that are unlikely to end in sales.

Let's say your small business sells high cost, luxury furnishings. The keywords you’ll want to put on your negative keyword list will be those that users rely on when searching for lower-cost items, like, "cheap furniture," or "affordable furniture." If you don’t take the time to put together a negative keyword list and allow Google to show your text ads for these search terms, much of that PPC traffic will be users who were never willing to spend close to your products’ average cost.

Choosing the right negative keywords is both a science and an art. Working with a digital marketing and PPC agency like ours with experience in your industry can give your brand a leg up, as we have already learned many of the most common negative keywords by industry, as well as the right keywords that deliver the best results.

Identifying negative keywords for your campaign may take some trial-and-error, but just remember, choose carefully. You don't want to exclude any search terms that could potentially bring you new customers.

To help your PPC advertising become even more profitable, RLSAs allow you to modify your maximum bid based on if a searcher has visited your site previously. It’s a great way to ensure you’ll show up higher on the page when targeting someone who is in your existing audience, a past customer, or from high-value traffic you’ve paid to acquire.

Retargeting is a very cost-effective marketing strategy, because it has lower CPCs and higher conversion rates. Because retargeting is so effective, and there is so much additional information about the opportunities it presents to advertisers, I've written an entire ebook on it. In Part III of this paid media guide, I share the best practices of retargeting across a variety of ppc ad platforms, including Facebook ads, Google Search, Bing Ads, and more.

Let’s look at a few examples of search ads that have highly-targeted ad copy. The below ppc ad appeared in the highest ad position for the search term "camper vans yosemite”.

In this ad, the headline text has very close relevance with the search term and uses the same keywords.

The description text provides answers to a variety of questions someone looking to rent a campervan for the short-term might have, like insurance, booking, variety, delivery, and travel flexibility.

For another example, let’s look at the top ranking ads for the search term, “best vegan supplements.” Both ads have headlines that are very relevant to the user’s query. The description texts have less relevance, but show more of what the websites offer. As the top ranking ads, both have different ad extensions they have used to enhance their advertisement.

In this example, ad extensions may be the deal breaker for where the user chooses to click.

The first ad uses a structured snippet extension to take up more space and to direct the user to additional information that a vegan would likely be curious about, like ingredients or an FAQ page.

However, the second ad has included a seller’s rating extension with their ad. With a 5-star rating and over 10-thousand reviews, this extension brings a lot of value to a user who is looking for the “best.”

A/B testing is a method for testing a hypothesis in which two variants are modified to compare performance, results, or effectiveness. Anything can be A/B tested, but in PPC management, these tests are powerful tools to improve the performance of each part of your campaign.

With the help of A/B testing, you can test ad copy, ad extensions, audience targeting and messaging, sets of keywords, and your PPC landing pages. When you notice one variant out-performing the other, change your campaign settings accordingly. Harnessing the power of A/B testing to measure your search engine marketing success is a great way to keep optimizing your campaign toward ideal performance and the best results.