SEM Ad Placement

“Relax. Enjoy the ocean breeze. Let your inner tube bob gently in the surf, tips of your toes touching into the cool ocean water. Inky black shadows muscle through the depths beneath you, but with Shark-Be-Gone shark repellent spray it’s nothing but another relaxing afternoon in the sun.”

Although the above radio campaign is convincing, using radio to reach a niche market is a bit like William Tell shooting from the hip with a sawed-off; we need a little more precision. The CEO of our fictional fish-phobic company, Scared Surfless LLC, knows she can’t afford to have her radio ad falling on deaf ears. As a full service marketing agency she’s asked us to look into other mediums, be they print, web or TV, where her marketing dollar can be leveraged more effectively.

Our recommendation? Use Search Engine Marketing (SEM) alla Google Ads to target her niche market. Let’s take a closer look how this can be done. We’ll start by exploring the two basic ways of targeting, then dig into more advanced methods for honing in on even more highly qualified viewers.

Keywords

Let’s start by selecting our keywords and phrases. These are terms we believe relate closely to our advertisement. Selecting the appropriate keywords and phrases is its own art, but for this example let’s keep it simple. Since we are selling Shark Repellent Spray we’ll use the keywords ‘shark attack’, ‘shark bite’ and ‘fear of sharks’.

Display Context

Our ads can be displayed in two main contexts: in Search Results and in Web Pages that are registered to display Google ads. When Google detects our keywords or phrases in a search query or on a web page, our ad will be queued for display. Did somebody mention a ‘shark attack’ on this web page? Since we’ve selected ’shark attack’ as one of our keywords, Google assumes this page will be a good context in which to display our ad.

Image & Text Ad Formats

Ads displayed in search results are the limited to three line ad-haikus called Ad Words. On the other hand, ads displayed on web pages have a much wider array of formats available to them. Formats include animated banners, towers, square images, and flash animations that display while a video is loading.

So, with ads on web pages, moving beyond the stale old “Eat at Joe’s” advertisement is not a problem. For example, how about we throw a great white in the mix? Using animation, we’ll have him lurch onto the screen, chomp away the “at”, the “s” leaving just “Eat Joe” to bleed away and reveal a picture of our handy aerosol product - Shark-Be-Gone. The possibilities are endless. For now, let’s leave the details to our graphic designers and get back to targeting.

Advanced Filters

Even without having applied advanced targeting filters we’ve already tapped into to highly relevant context for our ads. As we move into the more sharply focused filtering options below, consider that targeting is as much about locating the people you want to advertise to, as it is about weeding out the ones you don’t. Google Ad Words allows us to set a number of filters. Let’s take a brief look at each of these in turn…

Target Geographies

• By local, region, etc.
• By radius from a center latitude/longitude point.
• By a small custom geographic outline.

Target Languages

• By the viewer’s domain such as. de, .uk, .jp
• By the viewer’s language settings.

Target an Age and/or Gender

• Note: This has limited support since only a few sites can faithfully gauge their audiences age & gender.

Target Particular Web Sites

• Select sites where you know you target audience roams.

Display ads only at a particular Time Of Day

• Are your customers night owls or morning people? Serve your ads only at certain intervals throughout the day.

Gestalt!

The real magic happens when we apply multiple filters. When sharp shooting, two cross hairs are infinitely better than one. How about three, or four? At the intersection of our filters the ‘Shark-Be-Gone’ ad is displayed to very highly qualified viewers. No more shooting from the hip. With a little smart SEM and a few well-coordinated filters we are displaying ads directly to the heart of our target market.

Search Engine Marketing How To