Drive high-quality traffic and achieve your business objectives with expert Paid Search strategies.
Paid search is a powerful and strategic digital marketing technique that can drive targeted traffic to your website, boost your online visibility, and help you achieve your business goals. With paid search, you can reach potential customers at the right moment, when they are actively searching for products or services you offer.
By leveraging paid search platforms like Google Ads and Microsoft Ads, you can unlock the power of precise targeting, compelling ad copy, and strategic bidding strategies to drive results. Our digital marketing agency is well-equipped with the expertise and experience to help you unlock the full potential of paid search.
Our team of skilled professionals will work with you to develop customised paid search strategies that align with your business objectives, deliver measurable results, and drive tangible ROI. Let us help you unlock the power of paid search and take your online marketing efforts to new heights.
Paid Search places your ads at the top of search results, boosting visibility, clicks, and conversions.
Paid Search lets you target specific keywords, demographics, and locations for maximum efficiency, reaching the right audience at the right time for higher ad relevance and better results.
With Paid Search, you have full control over your budget and can set spending limits. Additionally, you can track and measure the performance of your paid search campaigns, allowing you to optimise your strategy for maximum return on investment.
At Clear Click, we have a proven roadmap for maximising your business growth through strategic Paid Search campaigns. From targeted keyword selection and ad creation to ongoing campaign optimisation, our roadmap is designed to deliver results and help you achieve your business goals. Let us leverage the power of Paid Search to drive your business success.
Welcome to our guide on Google Ads Image Extensions, a tool for increasing click-through rates and making paid search campaigns stand out. At Clear Click, we recognise the importance of appealing ads, particularly in the context of the rollout of Performance Max Campaigns and evolving consumer search trends.
With the rise of platforms like TikTok, there's a clear shift from text to images and videos in marketing campaigns. In this blog, we’ll explore how Google Ads Image Extensions can improve your campaigns and reduce your overall ads spend.
Google Ads Image Extensions allow advertisers to add images to their text-based paid ads. These images provide a more engaging experience, helping your ads stand out in busy result pages. When used effectively, image extensions can significantly boost your ad’s click-through rate, driving more traffic to your website from the search result pages.
Here is an example, although the two ads using image extensions rank second and third in the search results, they still achieve a better user experience than the ad in first place.
When you add an image extension to your Google Ads campaign, you can choose relevant images that complement your ad text. These images are displayed alongside your text ads in Google Search results, offering a snapshot of what you're offering and enticing users to click through to learn more.
To start using image extensions in your advertising campaigns, follow these steps:
Creating impactful images for your Google Ads Image Extensions involves more than just selecting attractive images. It requires a strategic approach to ensure that your visuals align with your brand identity and campaign objectives. Consider the following when selecting images:
Integrating image extensions into your paid search advertising can achieve higher engagement rates and make your ads stand out to your audiences. By adding a visual component to your text ads without using display ads, you're providing a more complete story about your product or service. This integration can lead to a more compelling and effective paid search campaign.
Explore our Paid Search Services to see how we can integrate image extensions into your Google Ads campaigns, elevating your paid search efforts to new heights.
Integrating Google Ads Image Extensions with other features can significantly enhance the effectiveness of your campaigns. Advertising to local audiences can benefit from localised visuals, featuring local landmarks, which resonate more with the targeted audience. This approach can also be leveraged to include geo-specific offers in the images, creating more compelling calls to action for users.
In terms of audience targeting, image extensions can be tailored to specific demographic segments, reflecting their interests and lifestyles. This personalisation can be done using behavioural insights, such as selecting images based on products the user has previously shown interest in. This targeted approach ensures that the visual content is as engaging and relevant as possible to each audience segment.
Beyond targeting, integrating image extensions with automated bidding strategies can lead to more efficient budget allocation. This includes conducting A/B testing with different images to find out which visuals have the best performance under various bidding conditions. Additionally, pairing image extensions with Dynamic Search Ads can dynamically display relevant images based on the user's search query, ensuring both the visual and textual content of your ads are highly targeted and contextually relevant.
Using these integrated solutions, Google Ads Image Extensions become more than just an attention-grabbing tool; they provide personalised and contextually relevant user experience at the beginning of the user journey, maximising the engagement and impact your Google Ads campaigns have.
Setting up Image Extensions in Google Ads is a straightforward process that can significantly enhance your ad's appeal. Here's a step-by-step guide to help you get started:
We’ve uncovered the role of visual content in Google Ad campaigns, and the shift towards images and videos, driven by platforms like TikTok and evolving consumer trends which underline the necessity of visually engaging ads.
Using Google Ads Image Extensions, advertisers can enhance their ad visibility, increase click-through rate, and stand out in the search engine results. This tactic transforms text-based ads into personalised and contextually engaging advertising.
At Clear Click, we stay at the forefront of these tools, ensuring that your Google Ads account not only captures attention but also resonates with and engages your target audience, leading to meaningful interactions and conversion rate.
PPC (pay-per-click advertising) and SEO (search engine optimisation) are often viewed as two distinctly separate digital marketing channels. Some might even see one as an alternative to the other and prefer to invest only in SEO or PPC. However, to make the most of these two digital marketing practices, you should ensure your PPC and SEO work together. This way, your SEO efforts can strengthen your PPC campaigns, and vice versa.
In this guide, we’ll go over six ways you can do just that. By following some of these best practices, you can strengthen your digital marketing strategy as a whole. Let’s get started.
SEO can drive incredible value for your business, but seeing results does take time. It usually takes several months for your efforts to bear fruit in the form of your website showing up at the top of the search engine results page (SERP).
In contrast, when you publish a PPC campaign, your ads will start showing up at the top of search engine results for your specified keywords almost immediately. Especially for newer businesses as well as new product launches, it’s good to get the ball rolling immediately with SEO, and while you wait for that to take root, boost your website traffic with PPC.
SEO is a truly powerful digital marketing tool. When you pause a PPC campaign, the leads you get through that channel dry up immediately. Meanwhile, the SEO work you do today, such as writing quality content and optimising your website around keywords, can bear fruit for years to come.
This makes SEO a very cost-effective digital marketing channel. With PPC, you’ll pay for every click, whereas with SEO, you won’t necessarily have to pay for anything at all - hiring an SEO expert or purchasing SEO tools is optional.
You’ll likely be working with a limited budget for PPC, which is why it makes sense to spend that budget to drive traffic to pages that don’t see as much organic traffic. Pages that already do well from an SEO point of view don’t necessarily need the extra boost. And in case you ever have to pause PPC campaigns or reallocate some of the budget for them, SEO will continue to ensure your visibility in the SERP.
In a nutshell, putting effort into digital marketing is an investment. Spreading that investment across PPC and SEO is all about spreading the risk.
For example, an ecommerce website might be doing very well on the SEO front, bringing loads of traffic into a couple of their product pages, but not all. A number of things can happen to complicate things.
It might be that a competitor comes out with a great new product that takes up much of the market share. Or maybe the interest in the products whose pages get a lot of traffic is seasonal, or the trend passes. Or, it could be that SERP structure changes and suddenly your page doesn’t appear on the first page of results - after all, search engines are continuously updating their algorithm for the best possible user experience.
PPC can help to protect against these risks. You can use it to drive traffic to pages that don’t get as much organic traffic through SEO or give some extra visibility to pages that suddenly struggle to get organic traffic.
As we already mentioned, seeing the fruits of your labour with SEO takes some time. This means that testing your hypotheses and running experiments with SEO is difficult. This is where PPC can come to your rescue.
Running a PPC campaign around a keyword new to you can help you test its viability for your business. You can then decide based on campaign data whether it’s worth investing your time into focusing some of your SEO efforts around that keyword. You can also run A/B tests with PPC campaigns, testing, for example, PPC ad copy you can repurpose as a meta description.
One of the most powerful ways you can ensure your SEO and PPC are working together is with remarketing campaigns. Remarketing is when you serve an ad specifically to people who’ve already visited your website. All of us have likely experienced this first hand: you see a product online and suddenly ads for it follow you all around the internet.
It takes, on average, about eight touchpoints with your brand before a prospective customer is ready to purchase from you. A remarketing campaign gives your prospects more touch points with your brand, making them more likely to convert. And since the audience for a remarketing campaign is already familiar with your business, they’re likelier to convert and as a result, your cost per conversion will be lower.
Running both SEO and PPC campaigns gives you access to plenty of useful data you can use to strengthen them as well as other channels within our digital marketing strategy.
We already touched on how you can use your PPC campaign data to decide which keywords to focus on in your SEO strategy. With PPC, you can also target specific demographics. Based on how your ads do within these demographic groups, you can create SEO content that speaks to them.
You can also use your SEO data in your PPC campaigns. You can identify high-performing pages and learn about your website visitors’ behaviour this way, creating stronger PPC campaigns as a result.
The data you gather both from your SEO and PPC campaigns can also help you optimise your other digital marketing channels; it can help you find your target audience and serve them better through your sales processes and on social media.
Sales funnels are complex. It may be that a prospect first discovers you through a Google ad, only to later come across your brand again when someone shares a blog post you wrote on social media. Another prospect may have found your website through organic search results, and later converts after being served a remarketing ad.
This complexity is why it’s so important to not have all your eggs in one basket when it comes to digital marketing - and investing in both PPC and SEO is a good way to address that complexity. However, that same complexity can also pose a challenge to SMEs with limited in-house resources. That’s where Clear Click comes in.
As PPC and SEO experts who specialise in working with small to medium sized businesses, we can help you build a comprehensive digital marketing strategy that makes the most of both SEO and PPC for the best possible results. If you’d like to find out more, don’t hesitate to book a free discovery call with us to learn about how we can help.
If you run extensive ad campaigns on Google, here’s something you ought to know. Starting June 30, 2022, Google has phased out its Expanded Text Ad (ETA) setup for a newer and more flexible Responsive Search Ad (RSA) format. While existing ETAs will continue to run parallel to the new format, advertisers will no longer be able to create or edit existing ETAs.
The move is part of Google’s new strategy that aims to put automation and machine learning at the centre of their services. Performance Max campaigns were one of Google's first shifts and now RSA ads will eliminate the need for micromanaging pay-per-click campaigns and allow advertisers to focus on their creatives. But what exactly are RSAs? How can they help you run and manage your campaigns better? Let’s find out.
Simply put, Responsive Search Ads are an automation-focused improvement on Google’s Expanded Text Ads, which most advertisers are familiar with. RSAs are adaptive ads designed to come back with the most relevant ad message in response to a search engine queries.
Instead of the three headline and two description options that ETAs offered, RSAs allow advertisers to create as many as 15 headlines and four different descriptions.
Together, this wider set of headlines and descriptions can be arranged in over 40,000 different combinations. In terms of split testing with different ad variations, the possibilities that these combinations offer are virtually infinite.
Google will use machine learning protocols to automatically test different headline-description combinations to figure out which ones perform the best. Google will return the best version of RSAs in response to a particular search engine query based on user profiles, keywords, past browsing behaviour, and other markers.
Moreover, Google will optimise these ads over time to boost engagement and keep advertising messages fresh.
RSAs boost ad performance by exponentially increasing the opportunities to match ads with specific search queries. But how do they do this? RSAs allow you to create 5x the headlines a usual ETA allows you to make. The more headlines and descriptions you enter, the more your ads get matched with and are shown to customers in response to their search queries.
Once advertisers enter all headlines and descriptions, Google arranges them into multiple ad combinations. Based on search queries, Google will learn which combinations are most relevant and effective over time. The best combinations will then be automatically prioritised to extract the most mileage for any ad campaign.
Google’s machine learning systems are designed to grow smarter over time and organically boost the best performing ads. This way, the new format will get better progressively, delivering fresh, engaging, and more optimised ad content tailored to customer queries.
Although the transition to RSAs might be challenging to some, the wider, long-term benefits of this format outweigh any initial hurdles. Here are some of the benefits of switching to RSAs.
Google’s latest ad innovation is led by a strong focus on automation and machine learning. It offers both small and large advertisers a wider playing field to display their creativity and craft ad campaigns that can be customised to match specific search queries, devices, and locations.
The following are some important tips to keep in mind for an optimised RSA campaign.
Users are quick to respond to ads that address their needs head-on, which is why headlines need to be compelling, smartly written, and attractive. All things considered, headlines make customers connect with ads, and eventually determine which ads Google prioritises.
RSAs will automatically test different headlines and descriptions in different positions to come up with the best ad message for each user.
Pins allow advertisers to pin headlines and descriptions to specific positions, so that repetition and redundancy can be avoided. However, this feature limits Google’s testing and learning capabilities by a substantial margin. Therefore, although pinning helps advertisers regain some degree of control that is lost in the RSA format, it is advisable to use this feature sparingly.
Experts recommend at least four ad extensions per ad group. Ad extensions help you meet your advertising goals while at the same time making ads more engaging and useful to users. Google reports that advertisers can clock increases by up to 20% in click-through rates by using ad extensions.
There is a learning curve associated with successfully executing RSAs. However, when properly calibrated, this innovation can ensure that ads reach the right audience and lead to conversions.
Google recommends having at least one ad per ad group with a ‘Good’ or ‘Excellent’ Ad Strength score. For this to happen, use the Google Ads Grader to zero in on your best-performing ETAs, and then use that content to craft effective headlines and descriptions for your RSA campaign.
It is essential to continue learning and testing variations of your existing ETAs to successfully migrate to the new format. For starters, make sure there is at least one RSA for each active ad group.
However, if you don’t have time to invest in learning how to use RSAs, contact us today. All of our clients we work with today already run numerous successful responsive search campaigns.
