23 Paid Search Planning Questions
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Ask Yourself These Questions to Set Up an Expert-Level Plan For Your Next Round of Sponsored Search Campaigns.
Ensuring your success with paid search marketing campaigns can be as simple as taking a few moments to figure out some key points of information that will help to shape and guide the setup and performance of the initiative.
I’ve broken down the 23 questions you should ask yourself during the pre-launch planning portion of your paid search advertising campaigns into four main groups:
Campaign Setup
Audience / Targeting
Measurement
Budget
These groups will help you set up an expert level paid program before you press go and spend money unnecessarily.
7 Campaign Setup Questions
These questions act as the main building blocks of the campaign overall and will play an important part in answering many of the questions in the other sections.
What is the goal for the campaign?
What are the KPIs for the campaign?
Are you utilizing insights from previous paid search efforts?
What is the duration of the campaign?
Are you using landing pages?
How much automation are you OK with?
Do you know whether your competitors are involved with paid search activities?
Some of these are fairly basic but are good reminders for when you get busy and have tight deadlines.
For some organizations, it’ll be one of the first times you’re going to try paid search and it will be important to identify the key things you want to learn from the campaign. Then in the next iterations, you’ll be able to focus in on the top keywords, best performing ads and have a much better understanding of how much you’ll need to budget in order to be successful.
9 Audience and Targeting Questions
These are arguably the most important questions to consider when putting together any digital marketing program using any of the available tactics and tools. The following questions will have a large impact on the types of ads, the messaging and how you’ll reach your target audiences.
Who are you targeting with your ads?
Where are they located geographically?
What search terms are they using when they search for your products or services?
Where is your target audience in the buyer’s journey when they search and click on your ad?
Do you have an understanding of the devices your potential customers are using throughout their research-to-purchase path?
Are you going to be utilizing Ad Extensions? If so, which?
Do you have a list of negative keywords to include to make sure you appear only for relevant search terms?
If you’ve read any number of marketing blogs you’re sure to have read about the intent behind the keywords a searcher is using. This is important because Google & Bing ad platforms reward the relevancy of an ad to the searcher and the query used. It’s smart to have a mix of ads targeted to different portions of the buyer’s journey. In addition, utilize the right ad extensions based on similar parameters to help the searcher get to what they are looking for as soon as possible.
For example, someone who is researching organizations or possible solutions to their problem will benefit the most from high-level awareness type of ads to assist their research. In this case incorporating site link extensions to your website’s “solutions,” “case studies,” or “about us” pages could be a good fit. I would recommend you avoid the temptation of putting offers and buy now messages in front of potential customers who are only researching a solution.
Your audience’s geographic location can be one of the most important factors to consider when setting up a campaign. In fact, Google’s research into location-based ads found that 32 percent visited stores or made purchased and 19 percent made unplanned visits to stores or made unplanned purchases.
5 Paid Search Measurement Questions
How much reporting do you need to make informed, strategic decisions?
Is the report only for you or will you need to communicate the results up the chain of command?
If you’re using landing pages, is the tracking set up and working properly?
Do you have the goal completions set up in Google Analytics around the KPIs of your campaigns?
Are these being communicated between Google Analytics and Google AdWords?
Are you tracking assisted conversions in addition to last-click attribution?
Discussing your reporting needs with your agency partner before launching a campaign is beneficial because we’ll identify the data points that will support the value created throughout the paid search activities. This is a good time to decide if you can utilize the dashboard reporting from AdWords or Analytics, or if you need something more customized that will involve more of your agency’s time to put together.
Most people think of last-click attribution when they think of digital advertising. They saw my ad, clicked it and converted. While this does happen, it will be a small percentage of the target audience you reach with your ads.
What’s more likely, and why you should track assisted conversions, is that someone in the target audience saw your ad, clicked on it, explored the site or landing page and left. Then later on - a day, a week or two weeks later - that same person does another search and comes to your site organically and converts. Or comes to your site multiple times through any number of channels before converting.
Without tracking the assisted conversions that conversion that occurred in the example above would be attributed to your website’s organic traffic, even though paid search started the person along their path to converting. It’s a great way to find out where paid search fits into your overall marketing mix with your target audiences.
Paid Search Budget Questions
Finally we get to the budget section. Contrary to what many people assume, the budget can often be one of the least important parts of the campaign planning process. This is because knowing who you are trying to reach, with which messages and how, shape the nature of the campaigns more so than the amount you’re able to spend.
Do you have a target CPA (Cost-per-Acquisition) or are you looking to only spend a certain amount?
Do you have enough budget allocated for the duration of the campaign to make a difference?
Assuming you have your keyword research completed, there is a way to calculate an estimate of whether or not your budget will be sufficient for what you are wanting to do with your paid search campaign.
Take your estimated campaign budget and divide it by the number of ad groups you want to use. This will be your “per ad group” budget. Then calculate a rough estimate of the campaign: the number of months multiplied by 30.44. 30.44 is the average number of days in a month throughout the year (365.25 days per year / 12 months). Finally divide the “per ad group” budget by the estimated number of days the campaign will run.
(Estimated Campaign Budget / # of Ad Groups) / (# of months x 30.44) = Estimated Daily Budget per Ad Group
Once you have this number you’ll be able to compare the amount of money allocated to each ad group to the average cost-per-click of the keywords within the ad groups. You’ll then be able to make changes to your campaign to better suit how many clicks per day you should expect. There are a ton of factors that go into the average cost-per-click so you’ll definitely need your target keyword research for the aforementioned formula to be relevant.
For example, let’s say you have $1,000 to spend on a paid search advertising campaign. After doing some keyword research, you’d like to focus on five ad groups of keywords associated with the various services you offer ($200 per ad group). However you would also like to have the campaign run for two months to capitalize on the top months in the year for your business. This means your campaign will run 60.88 days.
The thousand dollars, which seemed like a lot in the beginning is now only $1.64 per ad group per day. If you’re targeting some highly profitable, and highly competitive queries, you most likely won’t have enough to make a difference, or potentially your ad will never appear in the search engine results page. At this point you may consider adding budget or reducing the duration of the campaign, or the number of services you target to only the most important.
One More Question
This is where you can quickly see the value of having a partner who pays attention to your paid search program, while also collaborating with other departments to find out the average lead length, the CPA targets, and utilizing the multichannel and assisted conversation tracking. If you’re not at this level of sophistication yet, no worries! Be sure to set up some experiments to learn the elements discussed and you’ll get there once the campaign becomes an ongoing initiative that will be tweaked and optimized as you go on.
If at any time you need help contact your agency partner to assist you or you can call Google directly at 1-800-246-6453. Be sure to have your 10-digit advertiser account ID ready.
