 Welcome to The Journey. Today we're going to take you through a beginner's guide to ad spending. So when diving into the world of paid search advertising, I know there are a lot of synonyms out there like PPC and search engine advertising and however you label it, what it means is setting up ads on a search engine like Google or Bing where you pay each time the ad is clicked on. Paid search helps you attract new customers with timely marketing as well as improve your overall SEO efforts and most importantly conversions and at first glance, PPC can seem like a complicated pay-to-play system but instead of shying away, get informed with how paid search works and try to follow the paid search tactics to get the most bang for your buck. So social media and other websites of course offer you know paid advertising options but to keep this video from going over 10 minutes long, we'll only cover search engine advertising and let's start off with PPC. What is it? Well Emma, search engine advertising is a strategy built around the PPC model which lets you bid for the top search engine ranking for a given keyword or keyword phrase such as shoes or super awesome Nike shoes, whatever that might be and as an advertiser you only pay when a user actually clicks on your ad. PPC is incredibly effective when done correctly and it quickly gets you to the top of the search engine results to drive phone calls, driving directions, product sales, reservation, website visitors or any other desired action that you want those users to take. Moreover PPC allows you to take advantage of web users out there doing searches on the search engine without being as interruptive as a pop-up or those annoying banner ads. So according to a recent PPC survey 75% of people said that they actually prefer paid ads because it made it easier for them when they were on the hunt searching for something specific online. Well let's talk about how PPC differs from other SEO tactics. So I think the main difference between PPC and other SEO strategies is that that paper click allows for a very targeted approach with more immediate effects while SEO takes forever PPC can kind of get it done right then. A common industry comparison is to think of your overall SEO efforts as a marathon while your paid search is a sprint. SEO in general is a long game. You need to work on building valuable content for your site, strive to earn backlinks, those little mini upvotes online, build trust and several other factors before you can hope to rank well organically. Especially for new businesses and websites it can take years to increase your domain authority to be able to organically rank for desired searches and target keywords. Every business owner wants to see a return on investment with their marketing efforts right and PPC ads no different particularly because paid search can represent a significant upfront monetary investment so you want to ensure success. Cool and let's talk about ways we can actually do that starting off with optimizing your site before investing in paid search and this is super important. If you're paying to get users to go to your site you want to make sure that you actually have an effective site to begin with otherwise you're just wasting money. Make sure your sites and pages are clean and user friendly. Nothing makes a potential customer bounce faster than a poorly designed or cluttered site and as a website designer myself I cringe when I see a poorly designed site and it makes me go that much faster but I digress. Your site content should be helpful and formative relevant to the search terms or phrases in your ad. Having high quality content on your site will help your overall SEO value and while your site doesn't need to rank well to have success with paid search it certainly helps. Google takes into account the caliber of your landing page and the quality score and this ultimately determines where you end up on those search and result pages. So now we want to talk about how to choose the best PPC provider and there are two primary options when it comes to paid search advertising. Google first off the Google search networking compasses Google SERP Google shopping maps and other search partners and then there's also Bing network audience which is also known as the Microsoft advertising and this provider reaches AOL Bing and Yahoo users. And hey we all know that Google is kind of the king when it comes to search engine results but it may not be the best option for you. Don't forget the lower volume search engines like Bing. According to recent data the Bing network audience sees 5.5 billion monthly searches in the US alone and what's more the average click-through rate is 2.83% on Bing which is about 50% higher than what you see on Google. This means you can face way less competition than Google and potentially see better results and your overall cost per click. So next up you want to determine an effective and realistic PPC budget. I know keyword cost depends on industry it depends on popularity and some terms that or phrases like coffee mugs or car insurance they might have a CPC as high as like 200 bucks however don't fret other keywords might only cost you 40 cents as low as that because they're more niche or they're more locally based. You'll also want to consider long tail key phrases it's going to be cheaper and also show a higher degree of search and user intent. It's more likely that someone who searches a phrase like organic protein bars free shipping is later in the buying stage and someone who's just searches protein bars and therefore you have a higher chance of conversion. Pair that with the more prominent use of using voice to search and thinking about like what someone's going to actually say to search something versus type and that long tail keyword is it becomes more popular of a choice for these small business owners. Now we're going to talk about how to refine your PPC strategy based on data. I love data. Remember that PPC campaigns without any specific goals will inevitably waste money which no one wants to do that. So as you set up paid search ads align them with your overall business objectives and then of course keep track of your data to refine your campaigns. Now to measure success make sure you enable conversion tracking on your campaigns really important and that's because it allows you to track which conversions you monitor like for example website visits phone calls etc. And refer to these instructions for Google and Bing to help set this up. Now with this report you can actually also filter out negative keywords and filter out users that don't have the right intent and therefore you guessed it shouldn't be shown the ads. Another awesome thing you could do is try local search ads to increase local business right it kind of just makes sense. So these local search ads or as we all like acronym those LSAs which look different than traditional paid search ads use information from Google My Business page and location extensions to create a unique ad experience. And according to Google more than one third of mobile searches have local intent which is why they rolled out this feature for paid search advertisements. You can also use PPC to complement other non paid SEO strategies. So for example keywords and phrases will not only aid in your paid search efforts but your overall SEO and content marketing as well. And a PPC campaign that runs for even I don't know just a month or 30 days will help you realize which terms and which phrases your target audience searches for. And you want to make sure that you use your search term report and the CTR data to just better understand your the keyword as well as the ad. And the powerful thing here is you can start to use data to inform other SEO decisions. For example you can start to level up your content marketing efforts by integrating these high value keywords that you found into your blog schedule which in turn can help your organic ranking. And alternatively you can also start to build pages based on those keywords. But search engine advertising can seem overwhelming when you first start but with a strong plan in place and strategic thinking you can see significant returns on your ad spend. So look there's no one size fits all here. Be sure to look at what your campaign is. So you're not just purchasing traffic just for the sake of it. You don't want to do that and waste your money. You want to choose a marketing channel based on past results and the analysis that you've done to make sure it's in line with your campaign goals. All right that's a wrap. We just took you through a beginner's guide to ad spending. Please like this video and comment below with the favorite tip you received today. And while you're in there make sure you subscribe to our channel and ring that bell so you get these episodes first. This is The Journey. We'll see you in the next video.