Elements of Search Campaigns In Digital Marketing

When it comes to search campaign in digital marketing, you need to take time to analyse your search campaigns in order to discover keywords that you can use to reach your target audience. There is a need for you to really find out the keyword that can drive audience to your website. In this article, I want to look at the elements of search campaigns that you need to put into consideration when it comes to search campaign in digital marketing. There are key settings around campaigns that are not available on other levels, like the ad group level. These settings or elements that you can input into a search campaign include:

Name – name the campaign something sensible, something that you can easily recognize what it means
Goal – the goals you want to achieve
Location – locations you want to operate in
Language – languages of your users
Daily budget – how much you are willing to spend

To begin creating any campaign in Google AdWords, you need to:

1. Click the Campaigns tab on the left sidebar

2. Click the +Campaign button

3. Choose your campaign type, which for this module is ‘Search Network’ (Its good practise to not mix search and display campaigns)

4. Name your campaign – it’s always best to add search before your campaign name so you can easily see it’s a search campaign and be descriptive with your naming, avoid names like ‘campaign #1’

Next, set-up your goals – select the action you’d like users to take on your website, i.e. influence consideration/drive action.

Goals are a way that AdWords uses to optimize the type of performance, the type of activity you want to generate out of that search campaign.

There are a number of options available to us, such as ‘Drive action’, which are conversions, purchases or if it’s a mobile campaign, we can drive phone calls.

It is important to go through the different goals available and decide what is best for you; what goal relates to your business objectives, what activity do you want consumers to take that feeds into your business objectives.

Select the location and language you want to target
Use advanced search to find very specific locations to target or a set mile/kilometre radius around a location

Choose your bid strategy from the drop-down menu. Its best to start with the recommended bid strategy and optimize at a later date
Set your daily budget – for your budgets, it’s best to start off small to test and then grow if you see positive results
You can modify your delivery method so you spend your daily budget faster (accelerated) or evenly throughout the day (standard). Campaigns are automatically set to standard and it is recommended that you use standard delivery to optimize performance when you are new to AdWords
Skip ad extensions unless you already have some in your account (we’ll create these at a later stage)
When you have set these options, save and create your campaign.

Ad Groups allow you to organise many keywords into lists and then organise many ad groups into campaigns.
Ad Groups should contain similar keywords and a relevant ad that works for all keywords in the list, e.g. you have a phone case campaign with a cheap iPhone cases ad group. This ad group only contains keywords like cheap i-phone case, cheapest i-phone case, low-cost i-phone case, best buy i-phone case. The ad will talk about cheap iPhone cases so anyone who searches for the keywords on the list sees an ad about cheap i-phone cases – this is search relevance or specificity.
Set single bids for all of the keywords in an ad groups for simple management.

After you set up your campaign you are asked to create your first ad group
Name your ad group and enter your keyword list. You can add a list of keywords which you can manually type in or paste from the keyword planner download.

Next step is to write an ad that relates to your keyword list, includes your brand and compelling pieces of info like offers or benefits as well as a CTA to help drive action after the searcher clicks
Add additional ad copy variations as you see fit. Three ad variations per ad group is the recommended best practice
Click Save to set your campaign live.

Set an Ad Group level bid to give each keyword in the ad group the same bid
This is a way to quickly set bids for large numbers of keywords but it can drive mixed results as some keywords require different bids to work effectively
However, if you are running Single Keyword Ad Groups (SKAGs), where there is only one keyword per ad group, setting ad group level bids is the same as setting keyword-level bids

Use ad extensions to make your ad copy more appealing to the searcher by adding more information about your product or company like phone number, location (from Google Maps), deep links to product pages or features about your product.

Ad Extensions are found in the Ads & Extensions tab and can be added on an account, campaign or ad group level by choosing the extension from the list available and pressing the +extension button.

Tip: You might want different extensions, for example, for the TV campaign and the Radio campaign. You might also want different extensions for the Sharp TV ad group vs. the Sony TV ad group.

There are a number of ad extensions available to marketers to enhance the ad detail for searchers. They include:

Sitelinks: clickable links which appear below your ad and take searchers to different parts of your website like product catalogue, about us, blog or contact pages
Call out extensions: non-clickable pieces of copy which appear below the description
Call extensions: you can add your phone number which can be called directly from a mobile device or dialled manually following desktop searches
Structured snippet extensions: you can choose from a list of items and categories to add to your ad copy
Message extensions: mobile-specific ad extensions where searchers can send an SMS to the advertisers with a question or contact request
Location extensions: links your location from Google maps to AdWords and is particularly impactful on mobile as people search for directions
Affiliate locations: shows maps and directions to retailers or outlets that sell or stock your product
Price extensions: clickable cards with a product name, small description and price (these are swipeable on a mobile device)
App extensions: you can include a direct link to the Play/App store location of your mobile app so searches can download directly
Review extensions: links to third party reviews (from newspapers, blogs or other publications)
Promotion extensions: you can add a monetary or percentage discount on a specific product to your ad for specific occasions

Ad extensions are beneficial because they give your ad greater visibility and prominence on the SERP
On a practical level, they drive clicks and phone calls but they also improve the search experience by enhancing the ads with additional trust signals which can drive higher CTR and lower CPCs as quality score increases (we will explore quality score in more detail later in the module)

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