Throughout its colorful history, paid advertising has proven to be a legitimate source of lead generation, sales, and revenue for businesses. Now, online paid advertising (more specifically pay-per-click PPC advertising) has demonstrated its utility as an excellent channel of marketing for any company. So why does PPC advertising often become siloed, solely focused on search marketing advertising, and even more so, on Google AdWords search listing ads?
Most often, this happens when businesses start investing in PPC advertising with little or no knowledge of all that AdWords has to offer. There is a lot more to Google AdWords than just your basic search listing ads. So let’s take a look at an overview of the different types of paid advertising that are available through Google AdWords.
- Search Listing Ads (SLAs) – These ads appear next to or above relevant search results and allow you to reach customers on all the devices they use to search for information.
- Dynamic Search Listing Ads (DSLAs) – These ads use the content found in your website to target searches, rather than using keywords. They inclue headlines that are dynamically generated from the both the search and your site’s content. They then lead to a dynamically selected landing page on your site.
- Remarketing Search Listing Ads (RSLAs) – This is a feature that allows you to customize your search ads for people who have already visited your website.
Search Listing Ads
AdWords’ basic search listing ads are the foundation of many of our online advertising campaigns. Google continues to improve standard AdWords’ search listing ads and they have evolved over the course of the last few years with ad extensions. I use the ad call extensions, ad sitelinks extensions, and the ad call-out ad extensions the most frequently, but we’ll look at those further another time.
In addition to the basic search listing ads there are two other types of search marketing campaigns that can be created in AdWords, dynamic search listing ads and remarketing search listing ads.
Dynamic Search Listing Ads
These ads are extremely useful for companies with websites that have a large number of products or services. Businesses with websites that contain a lot of content or well-structured URLs will typically see the best results with dynamic search listing ads.
With these ads, Google writes your ad headline and sets the destination URL based on your website’s content. This sometimes limits how specific the description lines in the ad copy can be.
Also, negative keywords and exclusions are important in narrowing the targeting of your dynamic search campaigns. Left unmonitored and unfiltered (or incorrectly configured) dynamic search listing ad campaigns can run wild and be expensive. However, they are extremely successful when they are correctly configured, managed, and optimized.
Remarketing Search Listing Ads
These provide companies with a method of targeting previous visitors to their websites with tailored search listing ads. I find RSLA campaigns are most effective when used to target past buyers as they search for other products you sell on Google. They are also helpful in targeting people when they leave your site without buying anything and continue looking for what they need on Google’s search engine. Both the methods above are very effective for large ecommerce websites.
There are many other forms of advertising available in AdWords. In my next blog, we’ll discuss Display, Shopping Campaigns (Product Listing Ads), and YouTube.
To learn more about the best advertising options for you, or to get started with AdWords, contact the Versique Digital Marketing Team today!
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