Search Engine Marketing: The Ad Auction

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is pretty simple. It’s a way to get your digital ads in front of people who want to buy your product or service. When everything goes right, that’s what happens. Everybody wins!

Getting everything to go right is where the work is.  Because SEM often uses paid, targeted advertising, usually referred to as Pay Per Click (PPC), and the method used is an auction where you put in your maximum bid per click, there can be potential to blow a big hole in your advertising budget. Fortunately, the SEM experts at PulseISM are here to give you some pointers so that you avoid this possibility.

Three Factors to Auction Success

According to Google ‘How the Google Ads auction works,’ there are three factors in your success in the Google Ads auction:

• Your Maximum Bid
• Your Ad  Quality: whether your ads and landing pages they link to are useful and/or relevant to the person who will see it.
• Your Ad Extensions and other Ad Formats Expected Impact: when you create an ad, you have the ability to add extensions—phone numbers, or additional landing page links—that are evaluated for their expected impact on your potential customer. The more positive that impact, the better for your ad campaign.

Diving a Little Deeper

Your Maximum Bid—Your maximum bid is largely determined by your advertising budget, but not entirely. You’re bidding on keywords, and the quality of your keyword research and the resulting keywords have an impact on what you ultimately pay. Remember that your maximum bid is the most you will pay per click, but careful selection of keywords can increase the likelihood that you will pay less. The keyword experts at PulseISM can dial in the proper keywords for your targeted campaigns.

Your Ad Quality—The quality of your advertisements comes down to whether they and, perhaps more importantly, the landing pages they point to, are useful and/or relevant to your potential customers. Google Ads calculates a Quality Score that’s an estimate of the quality of your ads, keywords, and landing pages. This score is visible through your account, and you can work to improve it. A higher score leads to lower prices per click and better ad positioning on the page. Our SEM content experts can ensure that your landing pages and ads are highly relevant to your potential customers, resulting in conversions of new customers.

Your Ad Extensions Expected Impact—Adding additional information or links to your ads increase the potential that you’ll be relevant to your potential customers. The effectiveness with which you do this can result in a situation where you can win a higher placement at a lower price over competitors who have a larger maximum bid. The SEM experts at PulseISM can make sure that you have highly relevant keywords, ads, and extensions that build that impact and give you the most effective lead conversion with the least cost per click.

PulseISM: Your SEM Experts 

At PulseISM, we’re here to use our expertise in SEM to help your business thrive. There is a lot of ground to cover when dealing with SEM, and we’ve mapped the territory so you don’t have to. We can help you master these three factors of Ad Auctions and all the other things that go hand-in-hand with them for making successful SEM campaigns. Contact us to find out how we can help your business thrive!