Scaling Paid Search

Paid search is a media channel that can present itself as the shiny new object for businesses that haven’t tested ads here before.

I get it, you can put your brand in front of people actively looking for what you’re selling. How could you not be excited about an opportunity like this?

However, over the course of my career, getting paid search to perform efficiently, let alone scale, isn’t as straightforward as it may seem on paper. In this post I’ll dive into:

• What’s necessary to start a paid search program for newer businesses

• How more established advertisers can effectively scale existing paid search efforts

Building A Foundation Before Increasing Budget

Unfortunately, it’s going to take a business more than a credit card and basic website to start making money from paid search.

It’s important to set up a solid foundation by focusing on the basics before spending a single dollar. When working with my own clients, I usually follow three different sets of processes to get us moving.

Process Set 1: Marketing Foundation

1. Conduct customer research to understand how my client’s target audience behaves, and what they actually want.

2. Build out a messaging framework that helps me to speak the same language as my client’s customers, and hit on the point they care about most.

3. Set up all of the necessary tracking, measurement, and reporting infrastructure so that I know what’s working and what’s not.

Process Set 2: Creating A Cohesive User Experience

1. Identify appropriate keywords to target. When starting out, I usually advise clients to target keywords with a higher intent so that we can get more data around purchasing behavior compared to research behavior. For example, someone searching for “newsletter software” is more likely to make a purchasing decision than someone searching for “how to write a newsletter.”

2. I use the messaging framework from above to build out ad copy and landing page content that aligns with what the target audience is expecting. I do my best to make it easy on prospects, and reduce the need for them to use their critical thinking skills as much as possible.

3. For lead gen efforts, I align with my client’s sales team to understand how these leads will be handled. In some instances, I’ll also put together follow up email campaigns.

Process Set 3: Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself

Platforms like Google Ads have been leaning hard into automation over the past few years. Unfortunately, some of the default campaign settings won’t work in your favor. As a result, I always audit the below settings before setting any campaign live:

1. Networks: Disable search partners and display network. They’re notorious for driving poor quality traffic.

2. Locations: Select people in or regularly in your targeted location.

3. Automatically created assets: Turn this off so that Google doesn’t ruin all the hard work you put in creating tailored messaging.

   1. You’ll also need to navigate to Ads & assets > Assets > More Account-level automated assets > More > Advanced setting and set each of these to off until you’re ready to methodically test them.

4. Broad Match Keywords: Turn this off when starting a campaign. Broad match can be a bit wild, and steer you in the wrong direction without a large amount of conversion data guiding the bidding algorithm.

These steps won’t be 100% comprehensive for every campaign launch, but I’ve found them to be a solid starting place to ensure I’m giving new campaigns the best chance I can to succeed.

Quickly Identifying Segmentation Opportunities When Spending More

Once a campaign is launched and performing well, scaling this campaign isn’t as simple as dialing up daily budgets.

I’ve seen many examples where increasing the budget for a campaign results in that campaign suddenly losing efficiency. Part of the reason is economies of scale, the other piece is that increasing a campaign’s budget changes the auction dynamics for that campaign.

For example, let’s say I’m working with a client and have a campaign that’s generating leads (conversions) at a decent volume and efficiency, while using the maximize conversions bid strategy. Google will limit the auctions that this campaign enters to only those that are most likely to convert.

However, if I increase the budget for this campaign, it will now start to enter incremental auctions that might not convert as well because Google will do what it can to spend the allotted budget.

Using the newsletter example from above, with low budgets the keyword “newsletter software” might only match to search terms like “newsletter software” or “newsletter platform.” Competitors in this auction might be companies like Beehiiv, Substack, and ConvertKit.

When I increase budgets, Google might start matching that same keyword to terms like “email software” because there’s only a limited amount of search volume behind the core terms I’m targeting. The search results for “email software” will look much different than those for “newsletter software.”

This is why I’m always diligent about two tactics in particular when increasing budgets:

1. Analyzing search term data to add negative keywords and eliminate those irrelevant auctions.

2. Preparing further campaign segmentation to better align with subsets of search intent. Sometimes small search term variations can have slightly different intents that still align with what my client is offering. Creating different ad groups with their own unique ad copy and landing pages has been a great way to improve performance while scaling in the past.

I’ve found that preparing for a large budget increase in this way helps to steer campaigns back in the right direction after making these changes.

Wrapping Up

Paid search can be a powerful tool for businesses to bring in new customers, but it’s not as straightforward as it may appear.

I always work with clients to build out a proper foundation before spending a single dollar, while also understanding that paid search behavior and performance changes at different levels of investment.

Have questions, considerations, or critiques? I’d love to hear them! If you’re reading this via email, just hit respond. Otherwise, you can find me on LinkedIn.