Major retailers are re-evaluating their marketing strategies, with more and more opting to invest in Internet search ads, as this medium becomes mainstream. Indeed, Efficient Frontier, a search engine marketing firm, predicts a ‘double-digit’ increase in search ad spending this quarter, most notably from retail advertisers during the peak holiday online shopping season.

As this marketing medium becomes more popular, marketers are also becoming savvier. As a Wall Street Journal article reports, some of the new strategies include buying top ads tied to phrases consumers tend to search for when they are in the final stages of making a purchase decision. Being aware of how consumers search when they are ready to purchase, is critical to making your ROI as lucrative as possible.

With Halloween fast approaching, a good example of this might be using long-tail keywords like “buy a Spiderman Halloween costume” versus a more general search term like, “Halloween costume”. A consumer would be far more likely to use a long-tail keyword like the Spiderman example above when they are further down the sales channel, and are ready to buy.

When you do incorporate long-tail keywords in your search ads, make sure the landing page where you are sending the consumer truly matches their interest. Using the same Spiderman costume example, it would be wise to send the consumer to targeted page on your website. In this case, unless the landing page had a selection of Spiderman Halloween costumes, chances are that your ROI on this search ad would be less than attractive.

If you haven’t tried your hand in search ads, the holiday season is probably the best time of the year to give it a shot. Whether you choose to go with Google, or with Bing which increased its share of searches and search-ad dollars in Q3 (Source: PaidContent.org), Share Results is now offering its SEM services (contact Jamie [at] shareresults [dot] com), with a team of search engine experts, to get you going with what is now recognized as a very popular, and very savvy way of marketing.

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Search Ads Up, Marketers Savvier