Talk around the water cooler suggests that people think that no one clicks on search engine ads anymore. That. Is. So. Wrong. Over the past several years, paid search has become an increasingly competitive playing field for digital marketing. In fact, 2 out of every 3 clicks on search engine results pages are from paid search ads rather than organic results. So making sure that your ads have optimal reach and effectiveness in a more competitive landscape is tough business. For these reasons, training to become a paid search ninja is an absolute necessity.

Let me teach you the ninja ways:

Always Be Aware Of Your (Competitive) Surroundings

The competitive landscape for paid search is always changing, so understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors is essential for developing a successful paid search strategy.

Conduct a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis of your paid search account and your top three competitors. Ask these questions about your competition:

• What are they doing well?
• How many ads are they running?
• How often do they put new ads into rotation?
• What call-to-actions are they utilizing within their ad copy?
• What types of landing pages do the ads lead to?
• Are they using ad extensions?

Some of these questions are difficult to answer without third party tools, but do not fret, there are free options to help you conduct this analysis. SEMRush provides thorough analysis on competitor keywords, the average cost-per-click for those keywords and ad copy. Spyfu is another competitor spy tool that will allow users to see the average position of competitor ads, their estimated monthly AdWords budget and how many competitors are competing against a single keyword. I recommend checking out both tools when conducting a competitive analysis.

Utilize All Your Weapons!

Both Google AdWords and BingAds offer several different types of ad extensions to make your ads stand out in the sea of paid search. Take advantage of them! Ad extensions adds additional information to regular ole’ text ads, making your ads 1) larger to take up more ad real estate, 2) more interesting to look at and 3) more credible to your audience.

Also, both platforms offer robust reporting that can be extremely useful during optimizations. Take advantage of them! For example, AdWords offers a Time of Day and Day of Week report, which provide insights on how your ads perform and convert based on an hour of day and day of week. Adjusting your bids to increase during your peak conversion hours and days, and to decrease during poor performing times will help optimize your investments.

Free Your Mind for Strategic Planning 

Don’t waste your time doing the mundane maintenance tasks within AdWords. By creating automated tasks to run every day (at a time specified by you), you free up time for analysis and strategy rather than account maintenance. Some example tasks to automate are monthly performance reports, bid changes based on current average rank or keyword pauses based on click-through performance.

If you want to get really fancy, you can upload AdWords scripts to automate common procedures or interact with external data for all of your paid search accounts.

Double Team with Retargeting

Remarketing isn’t just for the banner ads in your display campaign. By implementing the AdWords remarketing script to your website, you can create remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) that contain searchers who have already visited your website and are once again researching for similar products or services.

Because RLSA ads only target people who have previously visited your website, you can structure your ad copy to have relevancy to that audience. This means you can be as creative and original as you want in the copy, since this audience is already familiar with your brand, service or product. Because of ad relevancy, RSLA campaigns typically generate higher click-through rates and more conversions, improving your overall account quality score. That’s a win-win!

Organization, Young Grasshopper

In the world of paid search, you always want to test different components of your campaign to see what resonates best with your target audience. Organization is key, and creating a testing matrix for ad copy testing or landing page testing will allow you to easily manage your A|B tests, track the results and deploy new tests.

Utilize these paid search ninja strategies and I can guarantee that your competitors won’t know what hit them.