SEA is the abbreviation for Search Engine Advertising. You buy advertising space within the search results of search engines. It is a form of paid marketing in which you promote your website, products or services in the search results of various search engines.
Not much explanation is needed here. We prefer to let the statistics speak for themselves here:
While setting up an SEA campaign requires a certain amount of effort, as soon as you put the ads live with just one click, you see immediate results. So you don't have to wait months to experience the impact of your work, the effects are immediately visible as soon as your campaign is active.
The power of SEA is reaching your target audience at the right time. You advertise at the moment they themselves are looking for your product or service. So you bid on the search intent of the consumer. If your consumer is looking for something else, he or she will not see your product. Goodbye to the wrong message at the wrong time! No more lost budget.
Only you determine which keywords your ads should be shown on. In SEA, you bid on the search intent of the consumer. You can not only set the keywords. You can go much further with targeting: location, time of day, age, gender, specific target groups, and so on.
Everything is measurable. Google Ads and other platforms constantly overload you with statistics about your performance. Number of clicks, click-through rate, cost per click, number of conversions, ... So you know perfectly how well or how badly your ads are performing. You not only get data about your ads, but also about which day, time and location your ads convert best and which target groups click on your ads the most. In short, you have an enormous amount of statistics at your disposal with which you can optimize your ads.
You don't have to spend thousands of dollars on SEA right away to see results. You decide how much money you want to spend on SEA.
"You can spend every penny you have on a website, but it will all be for nothing if nobody knows your site is there."
Try it out for yourself. Type a keyword into Google and see how many ads appear. For just about every search query these days, Google shows an ad. Many businesses have already found their way to SEA marketing. Since Google and other platforms only show a limited number of ads per search query and multiple companies advertise on them, keywords will become more expensive.
Campaigns, keywords, shared budgets, conversions, ad groups, extensions, responsive search ads, dynamic search ads... for many it is quite a challenge to set up an ad account. You need specific knowledge and expertise to set up your ad account in such a way that you have a clear overview and can make targeted adjustments.
A well-structured advertising account takes time. Not only in setting it up, but also in daily monitoring and optimization. You obviously want to make sure that you don't needlessly overpay or worse: that your ads are no longer visible.
Advertising costs money, so does SEA. You pay per click on your ads. How much you pay per click depends on how much you are willing to pay per keyword. Your bid for your keyword affects the auction. Luckily, you have control over how much budget you want to allocate each day. However, once it's used up, it's gone. No budget, no ads.
If you no longer invest in SEA, then you will also no longer appear at the top of search results and you will be virtually invisible. Because as stated earlier: no budget, no ads.
Define your goals
Before starting with SEA, it's important to set goals. What are the KPIs you want to achieve with SEA?
Think about your structure
Carefully consider the structure of your campaigns in advance. This will save you a lot of work later on.
Find your keywords
What keywords are relevant to your product or service? Which keywords are frequently searched for? Is there a lot of competition for those keywords?
Determine your budget
The more popular a search term, the higher the cost. So, set your budget according to the keywords you want to target.
Create your ads
Write compelling titles and descriptions that encourage action. Also make sure the ad copy is relevant to the search term.
Data is knowledge
Set up your conversions properly and integrate the ad platform into Google Analytics. That way, you'll make sure you're measuring everything correctly.
Review the statistics of your campaigns, put them next to your KPIs and optimize where necessary.
