SEM, the full name is Search Engine Marketing, which includes both SEO and paid commercial promotion optimization. However, the official definition is not very clear in the actual market application in China. In China, SEM is understood as a general term for PPC advertising, so the SEM team in a company is mainly responsible for bidding advertising, online alliances and other businesses of various search engines.
Pros and cons of doing SEM.
1. Advantages
(1) Quick promotion effect. Investing money can get keyword rankings, thereby bringing traffic. Compared with SEO, SEM brings traffic faster.
(2) Easy to test. SEM advertising is quick to take effect and has rich data information. It can be used for AB testing to compare and analyze which pages have better conversions.
Of course, SEM can also guide SEO’s keyword strategy. By testing different groups of keywords and corresponding landing pages, observing visitor behavior data and order conversion, select words with high user participation or high conversion rate as reference for SEO’s keyword strategy.
2. Disadvantages
(1) High promotion price. The highest bidder wins. Ranking is extremely unstable. If someone bids higher than us, our ranking will drop. In addition, malicious clicks from competitors will also incur costs.
(2) Small user coverage. Since search engines clearly distinguish between search ads and natural rankings, most users are unwilling to click on SEM ads, which leads to limited user coverage of SEM.
(3) Inaccurate promotion population. SEM is a form of paid traffic, but its customer volume is inaccurate and has a high bounce rate. Many people have the misunderstanding that bidding promotion can bring in customers. In fact, once customers come, the key is whether they can retain them.
Common SEM bidding promotion methods.
Common search engine SEM bidding promotions include Google Ads, Bing, and local search engines in the Middle East, which are all good choices.
1. Google Ads
Google Ads, renamed from Google AdWords to Google Ads in 2018, is a paid online promotion method that uses Google keyword ads or Google’s global content alliance network to promote websites. You can choose a variety of advertising formats including text, pictures and videos. Google Ads’ keyword bidding Adwords is a type of PPCO, and Facebook Ads and LinkedIn Ads are also a type of PPC. Only when our foreign trade website has marketing functions, it makes sense to promote Google Ads, otherwise it is “burning money” and a waste.
For some keywords that cannot be improved through Google SEO optimization in the short term, but can bring high-quality traffic, inquiries or orders, Coogle Ads must be used for delivery. In the case of matching with the corresponding landing page and foreign trade website marketing channels, the delivery effect of Google Ads promotion will be very significant. Google Ads promotion, money “burning” The more you ask, the more inquiries you will get. However, even if we have mastered the skills of advertising, but there are problems with the website structure, the copywriting is not good, and the marketing channel is not good, then no matter how much advertising money we spend, it will be “wasted”. Similarly, no matter how good the website marketing structure is, if there is no SEO, advertising, or SNS to bring traffic, it will be useless. Systematic marketing is the key to success. If Google Ads is not used well, it will become a “money-burning” machine, and if used properly, it will be a “gold-digging” machine.
Google Ads mainly have the following promotion forms:
(1) Text ads. These are the slogans we write, which appear in search engine search results or search alliance websites to attract users to click on them.
The billing method is based on bidding with competitors. You can set a maximum bid, such as 0.5 yuan. Google Ads promotion will determine the final price based on our bid and account quality score. If our account quality score is higher than that of our competitors, we can get the best ranking at a lower price than our competitors.
(2) Image ads. These are a type of advertising method that appears in the display network of the Google Promotion Alliance, with a charging model based on CPMD or CPC per click.
For example, a foreign trade company that makes DIY furniture finds four foreign DIY furniture enthusiasts forums. If it advertises on their websites alone, the websites require a fee of US$1,000 per month. The total cost for several websites is US$4,000, which is not a small amount of money. However, two of these four companies are partners of the Google Alliance, so you can directly place ads on their websites through image ads. Fees will only be charged if users click on them or the ads are displayed 1,000 times. This helps reduce costs when the number of clicks is small.
(3) Other ads. In addition to the two commonly used ad formats mentioned above, Adwords also has rich media ad formats such as video ads, Gmail ads, marketing ads, and online alliance ads. Google Ads promotion skills such as remarketing can greatly increase the conversion rate of our website and increase sales.
2. Bing Ads
Bing promotion bidding ranking ads are an online network promotion service provided by the Bing promotion platform. The advertiser’s promotion information will be displayed in the search results of Microsoft Bing for free. Bing promotion bidding ads are paid per click, and no clicks are free of charge.
(1) Bing Ads has the following four types of ads.
① Expanded Text Ads. They are expanded text ads, product ads, app installation ads, and dynamic search ads. The most basic search text ads are extended from traditional text ads, and mainly consist of three parts: ad title, display link, and ad description. In actual ad display, there are also various ad extensions (Ad Extensions) and various annotations (Annotations) to enrich the ad content and enhance the visual effect.
② Product Ads (PA). PA is another form of advertising different from text ads. It consists of custom pictures, product titles, descriptive text, prices, and promotional information, and can be displayed on both PC and mobile terminals. PA requires customers to provide detailed information about the product to determine which type of customers can see the ad for the product. When users search for keywords related to the advertised product, product images may pop up.
The main advantage of this type of advertisement is that it allows search users to see product images intuitively, effectively attracting customers’ attention, thereby bringing higher CTR” and R0I. Currently, PA can only be displayed in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, France and Germany.
③ App Install Ads. App Install Ads are similar to text ads, but the difference is that this type of ad will provide an install button to link users directly to the Apple iTunes Store or Google Play Store to increase App downloads. This type of ad is mainly aimed at users who have App promotion needs and only supports display on mobile terminals.
④ Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) DSA is a precision marketing ad automatically generated based on user search terms and website content. It is a supplementary form of search text ads. DSA integrates Bing’s natural search technology and automatically generates corresponding ads based on the search user’s keywords, website content and positioning targets. When creating an ad, advertisers only need to prepare the corresponding advertising slogan based on the automatically positioned website content. DSA can automatically generate the ad title and landing page. URL).
(2) The relevant information about Bing’s promotion area is as follows:
Microsoft’s search engine promotion in China is divided into two sections: domestic and Bing export. Domestic is placed on cn.bingcom, and export is placed on the corresponding Bing country website. Sellers can freely choose the placement method. Since Bing is jointly promoted for customers with Yahoo, if sellers want to display ads on Yahoo, which countries will see the ads?
Since Yahoo is a portal type website, unlike Google’s homepage which only has one search box, Yahoo’s homepage has a wealth of different types of information, so it is difficult for it to have its own website in each country, because this requires the establishment of a Yahoo editorial department in the local area, which is difficult to achieve, so Yahoo only sets up websites in some countries it considers important.
Open www.yahoo.com and click the drop-down arrow on the right side of the icon in the upper right corner, and you can clearly see the country versions that it currently has for promotion.