Paid Ads

Smart Strategies, Maximum ROI.

Turn Questions into Customers

Every Google search is a problem looking for a solution – but with so many results, where do you even start? You know that your business offers just what these potential customers are looking for, and paid search engine marketing is your option to skip the line and jump your website straight to the top of the results. With the right paid ads, your customers can go from “huh?” to “aha!” more easily than ever before.

Why Skol Marketing?

SEM (Search Engine Marketing) can have a high pay off, but you don’t want to waste your budget on ads that don’t convert – you’ve got smarter ways to spend your hard-earned money. Skol Marketing is an ad agency in Minneapolis started by former Google employees that know search engine advertising inside and out: whether you’re running ads on Google, Amazon, Bing, or another platform, our experts are committed to building digital ad campaigns that build your business and support your goals.

Analyze

Spotlight the terms your customers are searching for

Advertise

Craft creative ads that convert searches into sales

Adjust

Track conversions and refine your ads to bring in more clicks

The Right Ads for the Right Eyes

Any PPC agency can set up ads on Google, but a good pay-per-click campaign will adapt to focus on what works. The beauty of paid ads is that they’re the most trackable marketing tool in your arsenal – if you track your conversions and adapt your ads to what works, the ads ultimately pay for themselves (and then some!). Skol Marketing is your partner for paid ads – we follow the data, and we hold ourselves accountable to your goals and the success of your business.

This means we utilize tools like A/B testing, landing page optimization, and other creative solutions to find which ads are converting into quality leads. Those terms mean nothing to you? Even more reason to let us do what we do best – and manage your budget wisely to make sure you’re only spending money on advertisements that benefit your business.

Got Questions?

When running paid search advertisements on Google, you can define your payment based on a number of goals. The three major goals for Google ads are clicks, conversions, and impressions:

  • Cost-Per-Click means you pay each time a search user clicks on your advertisement, and is typically best for driving traffic to your website.
  • Cost-Per-Conversion means you pay each time a search user takes a particular action on your website – typically a purchase, sign-up, or download.
  • Cost-Per-1,000-Impressions means you pay for every thousand times your ads are shown to search users, regardless of if they click through or not. This is most useful for building awareness, but not necessarily sales or site visits.

When you work with Skol Marketing, we’ll work with you to define the purpose of your paid ad campaign and help you figure out which payment goal will bring the strongest results!

There is no “one-size-fits-all” answer to the question of how much you should spend on Google Ads – the overall spend will depend on not just your industry, but also how much competition is competing for the search terms you’re bidding on. Different industries, locations and services/products can have varying businesses competing for those same terms.

The more important question to ask is how your Google ad campaign fits into your overall paid marketing strategy. At Skol Marketing, we’ll help you create a digital marketing strategy that works for your business, based on your goals and budget: including paid search ads if that makes sense for your needs.

In the digital marketing world, a “conversion” is the word for any search user that views an advertisement and then goes on to take a desired action on your website. Most commonly, people think of conversions in terms of sales, eg: someone makes a Google search, sees your ad, clicks through to your website, and buys your product. However, conversions can really be any action that you find of value: filling out a contact form, downloading a white paper, joining an email list – all of these actions can be considered conversions if those actions are your desired goal.

Skol Marketing firmly believes that great ads and a great website are two sides of the same coin. Your ad is what brings people to your website, and your website is then responsible for really selling them on your product or service and winning that conversion.

To answer the question directly, no: you don’t need to have a website to run Google ads. As long as you have a Google business profile, you can run ad campaigns to direct search users to your business, even without a formal website. However, not having a website (or having a sub-par site) is significantly limiting your ability to convert interested search users into paying customers.

On the flip side, having an easy-to-use, informative, and stable website gives you so much more control over your customers’ journey, and we consider it a truly vital element of any business. You have the power to define your brand, guide customers through your funnel, track and use visitor data, and so much more.

Building a website can feel daunting, but Skol Marketing makes it easy – you’ll meet with us to lay out your goals and give your approvals, but our skilled team of experts will handle all the difficult design and development work, so you can focus on running your business.

If you’ve used Google search, you’ve almost certainly seen what paid search advertisements look like – they often appear very similar to organic (non-paid) search results, with relatively minimal elements identifying them as advertisements.

When we start working with a new client, we typically focus on text and display ads. These are words and visual content that can be displayed not just on Google, but also on YouTube and other websites around the internet – making them a great way to get your business in front of the right eyes, no matter where they are.

Our team of designers and copywriters will brainstorm ads that we think will help your business generate interest, clicks, and conversions, and we’ll always make sure to run them by you for approval so you know exactly how they read and what they look like.

PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click, and it refers to search and website advertisements where the company being advertised pays based on actions taken. PPC advertising functions on a bidding system, where a business will “bid” up to a certain amount of money to serve ads to a certain demographic or for a certain search term – and only pay when those ads receive engagement. This could literally be paying for every click the ad receives (as the name implies), or it could mean paying for other actions, like conversions or impressions served.

If you’re familiar with Google Ads (formerly known as Google Adwords), then you’re familiar with PPC advertisements already – it’s one of the most popular PPC ad platforms and one that Skol Marketing loves using to help businesses drive traffic to their websites.

Organic (unpaid) search and social media marketing is crucial, but can also take serious time and dedication to build. After all, only so many results appear on Page 1 of Google, and it’s a lot of work to get there! Search ads allow your business to spend money to “jump the line” and get your brand in front of users searching for the exact terms you want, without the required search engine optimization needed to appear organically.

Ultimately, organic SEO and social media marketing works hand-in-hand with paid ads to make your business more visible and bring more traffic to your website. This is why we strongly recommend any business serious about improving their digital presence take a complimentary approach that incorporates both organic and paid digital marketing.

While pay-per-click campaigns do not directly impact your website’s SEO, they can offer some indirect help if you use them smartly. First, PPC ads can benefit general brand recognition and awareness – if someone sees your brand’s ad in their search results, they may be more likely to seek out your website organically (which can positively impact your SEO). Additionally, PPC ads give you access to a wealth of data about potential customers, which can help inform which search terms you try to rank for organically and which audiences you try to target with your SEO efforts. So even if PPC doesn’t directly help your SEO, if you follow the data and act with intention, you can certainly use it to inform your SEO strategy.

Conversely, a great SEO strategy can absolutely have a positive impact on your PPC campaigns. Strong organic results and a high quality rank will show Google that your site benefits their users – and you can often find better paid ad rates as a result, allowing you to get in front of more potential customers at less cost to you.

The common answer for how fast PPC ads take to work is that they go to work quickly, compared to SEO which takes much longer – and while that’s largely true, you can’t expect immediate results from either. Most experts generally say that PPC campaigns take an average of 2-3 months to get out of the “learning period” and really start showing strong results. Rest assured that with a good PPC marketing agency like Skol Marketing, your paid ad campaigns will make the most of your time and budget.

AI is a new frontier in the world of PPC ads, but the early results are positive. AI integration allows business to automate much of the hard work of managing a paid search advertising campaign – analyzing search user demographics to determine who’s likely to click, managing and adapting bidding strategies based on prior results, and even suggesting changes to copy and creative are all in the realm of possibility with new AI-integrated PPC functions.

However, this doesn’t mean paid search ads are suddenly easy. It’s still crucial to have a reliable, trustworthy local ad agency in Minneapolis that works with your business to define goals, track metrics, and keep all your campaigns on track – and that’s what we at Skol Marketing do best.

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