Getting Website Traffic From Search Engine Ads

You’ve probably heard that search engines are a great place to generate website traffic from. However, people often talk about SEO, which takes time and is a long-term strategy. This is not the case with search engine ads. They work within 1-2 days after they are created and can generate website traffic on autopilot.

Search engine ads give you full control of everything. You can choose how much you want to pay, where in the world you want the ads to appear, which searches your ads should appear on, and much more.

Generating traffic from search engines is highly targeted because you can choose which search terms (keywords) you want to find. Search engines can generate traffic for any niche as long as people are searching for it. They give you full flexibility to decide your daily and monthly budgets, cost per click, location, and much more.

The Step-by-Step Guide To Search Engine Ads

It’s very easy to set up your ads on search engines for your affiliate business. It can be done in less than 1 hour, even if you never tried it before. But there are a wide range of strategies you can use to get more clicks, lower cost, and higher conversions.

Most search engines don’t allow you to send traffic directly to affiliate offers, so you’ll need a landing page. This can be an article or presale page that warms up the visitor before entering the affiliate offer’s sales page. You can also collect subscribers to your list with a squeeze page with an opt-in form.

Here are the 6 steps of setting up effective search engine ads.

1. Choose Search Engine

The most popular search engine is Google. You can advertise on Google with Google Ads. They provide a great advertising service, where you can generate traffic from their search engine and search engine partners. It can be a good idea to start using just their search engine and expand later on. Google often offers a startup coupon that gives you something like $100 ad credit for $25. This does vary from country to country.

Click here to get started with Google Ads.

Another great search engine is Bing. You can advertise on Bing with Microsoft Ads. The competition is often lower on Bing, which gives a lower price per click. Both search engines offer similar advertising services and can work great in combination with each other. Bing often offers a coupon of $50 ad credit without any initial payment. This varies from country to country.

Click here to get started with Bing Ads.

2. Target Group

Before you get started, you’ll need to consider who your perfect customer (avatar) is. Where are they coming from? What will they search for? And, What device are they using? You might have more than one avatar but start with the most likely to turn into a sale. Afterward, you can always create more campaigns for the remaining avatars to see what works best.

3. Ad Text

You will need to write the ad that is displayed on the search engines. It gives the best results if you write the first letter of every word with a capital letter. You should always include the keyword 1-2 times and a call to action in the ad.

It works best if you create an ad for every keyword, so it’s more targeted. However, you don’t need 2 ads for “How to lose weight” and “How can I lose weight.” But you should create different ads for “weight loss” and “diet” keywords.

4. Keywords

It would be best to always choose the keywords that have the highest probability of turning into sales. For example, it’s more likely that a visitor will take action if they search for “how to lose weight” than a search for “weight loss.” The first search indicates that someone wants to lose weight, where the second search is more general. This can be a person that wants to lose weight, but it can also be someone who wants to know what weight loss is.

You can use quotes, “keyword,” to indicate phrase match or brackets, [keyword], to indicate exact match. If you don’t use these, then you will appear on all searches that include the keywords.

Another term that is important to know is negative keywords. These are the keywords you don’t want to appear on. You can see which keywords you have been found in the keyword section. Add all the keywords you don’t want to continue to appear on to your negative keywords.

5. Budget

The budget should always be small in the beginning. Start by using a budget of $5-10/day and see what keywords convert into sales or subscribers. Then add the keywords that don’t convert to your negative keywords and scale up your budget on the keywords that do convert.

The price of the ad is determined by the competition and your ad quality score. So, if you choose to pay $0.2/click, you will be ranked lower than someone who wants to pay $0.3/click if you have the same quality score. However, if you have a quality score of 8 and the competitor has 4, then you will get higher ranked at a lower cost. It will give you more clicks if you are ranked at the top, but it’s also more expensive per click. So it can be an advantage to rank lower to keep costs down. The quality score is determined by how relevant your ad is to the search for your keywords.

6. Devices

You can choose which devices you want your ad to appear on. PC is, in general, the best because people often have more time when they use a PC. However, mobile and tablet work great in most cases. You can adjust your bid to specific devices and thereby choose to pay less per click for tablet and mobile.

This is set up in the targeting section, where you can adjust your bid with a percentage. You can, for example, decrease your bid by 50% on tablet and mobile and get cheaper clicks on these devices. Decrease the budget by 100% to disable a device.

Final Words 

Now you need to take action and get started with your ads on Google or Bing. Start with one and expand to another later on. Keep in mind that both advertising services can generate traffic from other search engines as well. The 6 steps will help you generate website traffic from search engines with ease.

Remember to start with a low daily budget to see what works best for your business and niche. Then scale up your budget as you figure out what converts. This will give you the best value for your money.