One of the advantages of SEA is that you can monitor your Return On Investment. Unlike with other types of advertising, you know the traffic level and the subsequent visits it generated because everything is measured and measurable. Another benefit is that you are billed is by pay-per-click. Which does not generate any costs, unless a visitor clicks on your business’s link. This allows you to manage your budget properly according to your goals (measured in terms of visitor volumes and / or sales) and adjust your spending to the cost of a click. The cost you pay per click is mainly based on the quality of your advertisements, your branch and the competition in this branch. If you aim a wide and competitive market it can cost you dearly in pay-per-click advertising. I suggest you target a specific audience and choose specific key words and phrases, because it is useless to see big and spread your net too wide.
There are different tools to help you in your analysis, such as Google’s keyword planning tool.
You can also use key phrases (deep sea fishing) that will allow you to, despite the lower volume of traffic associated to specific expressions, reach deeper into the market and find quality customers that really want to see what you have to offer. Consider the following example: Suppose you sell car parts, a competitive business, you can choose to advertise your business using links connected to the keyword "car parts". This will probably lead to a lot of traffic from potential customers but 1) your display space will be quite expensive and 2) the target audience is large and may be not looking for the car parts you offer.
So if instead, you select a phrase that will has a deep instead of a large reach, such as "BMW exhaust system parts", there may be fewer daily visits, but you will have a customer who is looking for a specific item on your website. Even better, by using well-targeted search terms, you can direct the visitor to a specific webpage, in this case, the BMW parts. By the way, on Google the term “car parts” returns about 48 million hits (surrounding the term with quotes “ ” for an exact match), whereas you will only get around 27 thousand hits using the term “BMW exhaust system parts”.
To develop and implement advertising campaigns you can use Google Adwords or Bing ads, depending on the search engines you would like to use.
For website-layout optimization and to quickly know the interest of potential customers, it is important that a page is easy to visit, with a clear message and good calls-to-action.
Once you have incorporated these points into your website it is not enough to put it online and wait for everyone to come. It is necessary to review points (changes in the page contents, advertising, etc ...) so your SEA campaign has the highest Return On Investment possible.
What are your thoughts on SEA and online advertising? Have you already tried it?
We always like it if you share your own experience with us. So feel free to let us know.