What does search engine marketing include?
Search engine marketing covers paid placements on search engines, the display and YouTube campaigns that support them, and the work behind it all:
- Keyword research and structure. Ad groups organized around tightly themed keyword clusters, so every search that triggers an ad is relevant to the ad it sees.
- Ads and assets. Responsive search ads with several headline and description variations, plus sitelinks, callouts, and call and location assets.
- Bidding and budgets. Strategies matched to each campaign's goal and data, with budgets paced across the month.
- Shopping and Performance Max. Product feed campaigns for e-commerce, structured by category and margin.
- Remarketing, display and YouTube. Reaching past visitors and new audiences beyond the search results page.
- Landing pages and tracking. Pages that keep the ad's promise, and conversion tracking that records the calls, forms and sales each click produces.
How do you keep wasted ad spend down?
Most wasted spend comes from searches that were never going to convert: job seekers, do-it-yourselfers, people looking for a free version, or customers outside your service area. We build negative keyword lists before launch, then review the search terms report regularly and keep adding to them. Keyword match types, location targeting, ad scheduling and device adjustments do the rest.
The other common leak is broken or missing conversion tracking. If a campaign cannot see which clicks became customers, automated bidding optimizes toward the wrong thing, so we verify that every conversion action fires correctly before spend increases. More in negative keywords: the list nobody builds.
Why do landing pages matter so much in paid search?
Google gives each keyword a Quality Score from 1 to 10, based on expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. The score itself is a diagnostic, but Google assesses ad quality in every auction and says higher ad quality generally means better positions at lower cost, so the page a click lands on affects what you pay for the click itself.
A strong landing page repeats the promise the ad made, loads quickly on a phone and makes the next step obvious. Because we design and build websites, we create or rework landing pages ourselves rather than sending traffic to whatever page already exists. Read the landing page decides the cost for the detail.
How do Google Shopping campaigns work?
Shopping ads are built from a product feed in Google Merchant Center rather than from keywords. Feed quality decides which searches your products appear for, so we start there: clear product titles that carry the attributes people search for, accurate categories, good images, and correct price and availability data.
Campaigns are then structured by product category and margin, so bids reflect what each product is worth to you. Performance Max can extend the same products across YouTube, Display, Gmail and Discover, and we use it where the conversion data supports it.
How is conversion tracking set up?
We set up conversion actions in Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising through the Google tag and Microsoft's UET tag, connect Google Analytics 4, and track the actions that matter to your business: form submissions, phone calls from ads and from the website, purchases with their revenue, and bookings.
Where sales close offline, we can import outcomes from your CRM, so campaigns learn which clicks became paying customers and not just which ones filled in a form.
Do you run display and YouTube ads as well?
Yes. Display campaigns extend reach beyond the search results to websites and apps across the Google Display Network, and are most useful for remarketing and for reaching people who are not searching yet. On YouTube we set up and manage in-stream, in-feed and bumper ads using the video you supply, targeted by audience, interests and search activity.
For placements on specific publishers, including our own network of websites, see our display and native advertising service.