Director of Partner Growth, Callum Ridley, is excited to publish the next blog in our series, ‘A Partner’s Guide to Marketing Channels’, which takes a deep dive into how partners can grow and improve their overall site performance through different marketing channels. Growing your business in this way will ultimately enable you to optimize a revenue stream through the partnership channel.
Callum recently interviewed Sarah Williams, Associate Director at Ortus, to talk about all things Paid Search Marketing! Ortus is a boutique agency specialising in performance growth through Paid Search, Social & Display.
With over nine years of paid marketing experience under her belt, Sarah has led on countless successful campaigns including PPC management for Clarks across all major European markets, where she delivered their biggest Back to School period ever for two consecutive years. Sarah’s main focus is ensuring the team go above and beyond to exceed client expectation and consistently over deliver on performance results, which has earned her industry award recognition including ‘Digital Strategy of the Year’ at The Drum Awards.
Callum Ridley: What is Paid Search Marketing?
Sarah Williams: Paid Search Marketing is essentially advertising your product or service in front of potential customers through search engines such as Google, whilst they are actively searching for your offering. This marketing channel, often referred to as PPC (Pay-per-click) – does exactly what it says on the tin, an advertiser will only pay for that ad once it has been clicked.
CR: What are the benefits of utilizing paid search for a partner?
SW: Paid Search is often a key digital marketing channel and typically, we see on average paid search contributing anywhere from 20%-40% of total online traffic and revenue for our clients. A huge benefit of running Paid Search Ads is their ability to be created and up and running within hours, meaning there is nothing stopping a partner from generating new traffic from day one! Other advantages of Paid Search are:
- The marketing channel accommodates all sized partners, as there is no minimum ad spend required to begin advertising, whether your budget is £50 a day or £5 million, you can run Paid Search ads.
- You control the budgets for your campaign, so spending doesn’t run away with itself.
- Paid Search reaches audiences who are specifically searching for your brand, product or service, meaning they already have high intent and therefore removes a lot of guesswork around whether customers you are showing ads to are interested in your product/service.
- Paid Search is a great advertising solution which caters to a wide range of marketing objectives, from whether you’re looking to generate direct revenue, to focusing on creating top-funnel brand awareness for your business.
CR: Which Ad formats are available through paid search?
SW: Our core platforms used for paid search offer a huge catalogue of ad formats – which are consistently evolving too. There are text ads (which have their own customisable extensions on top too), shopping ads, video ads, discovery ads, responsive ads, call ads and app-install ads to name just a few!
CR: Which platforms should be prioritised, in a Paid Search strategy?
SW: It completely depends on your audience, location, budget and account objective, however, as a rule of thumb, we usually suggest Google first for our UK based clients, with so much of the population using this search engine daily. We do also recommend to the majority of brands it is definitely worth running Paid Search ads through Microsoft Ads though too, as this reaches a UK audience which aren’t using Google as their primary search engine. Both platforms have a different core audience, so we’d assess our clients objectives and audience and work out the best platform and budget allocation based on which platforms offer a better fit for the brand specifically.
CR: What would be your top three tips to gain new customers through Paid Search?
SW:
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Use the right campaign types and bidding strategies specifically focused on driving upper-funnel brand awareness. From here, have a strategy in place to nurture those who then become aware of your brand, click to your site, browse pages of your site etc, all the way through to completing a purchase/engaging with your CTA.
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Use short-term key sale dates within your Paid Search strategy to push harder with the more upper-funnel campaign and ad types to get in-front of new customers. During key dates in the shoppers diary, such as Singles Day and Black Friday, consumers become a lot more open to trying a new brand and there is less brand loyalty in the market.
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Make the most of “lookalike” audiences and those “in-market” generated in your ad account – all of which you can use to target ads towards. Lookalikes are those who are similar to that of your current on-site customers and users, those in-market are those deemed by the platform for showing intent in the specific product/service you offer.
CR: Can you recommend any Paid Search Marketing tools?
SW:
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Google Trends is an all-round favourite at Ortus. Not only does it help you spot when demand for search terms are on the rise, it allows you to look historically at the search term to help you when understanding trends in the market, for example when there has been a burst of clicks in your ad account and you’re unsure why – sometimes an external factor has caused a huge uptake in demand.
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The recommendations tab within the Google Ads interface is always a helpful tool for our team, as it collates all of Google’s suggestions in one place on optimisations they’d suggest, as well as flagging any issues/disapprovals within our account too so we can react quickly!
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Scripts to insert into accounts are a life-saver, for automating ads in bulk, changing bidding based on the weather in real time and monitoring when budgets deplete by the hour over key sale dates – they literally act like an addition to our team, so we can focus more on strategy!
If you are not currently working with Partnerize, let’s have a conversation! You can reach out to our Partner Growth team on partner.growth@partnerize.com or you can sign up for a Partnerize Partner Account here.
If you have additional opportunities available over the next few months, for brands and retailers to get involved with, let us know! We would love to help get the word out and share these on the Partnerize platform. You can submit your opportunities here.
