- Define your goals and objectives before you start any paid search campaigns.
- Target your search account to your website – create individual ad groups around products and services you have pages for.
- Keep keywords in each ad group to a minimum and ensure they are all thematically relevant – ideally less than 2.5 keywords per ad group.
- Write bespoke creatives for each ad group and always run with three or four variations of messaging so you can test which works most effectively for your business.
- Think carefully about match types: don’t put everything on the default broad match option unless you know what you are doing.
- Include as many negative as possible and look to add these at an ad group level.
- Decide carefully about whether to use in-house skills or an agency, and complete proper due diligence.
- Focus always on the ‘quality score’ and the user experience. Setting up search badly hits your pocket very hard, and costs much more money than necessary.
- Keep a close eye on competitors and the search landscape – their messaging and keyword coverage gives you an indication on what will work for you!
- Optimise, optimise and optimise the account – this needs to be done regularly in order to get the best out of performance.
Ryan, D., 2016. Understanding digital marketing: marketing strategies for engaging the digital generation. Kogan Page Publishers.