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Paid Search advertising agency

Search & destroy the competition

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Visual representation of Dark Horse’s paid search advertising services, designed to target customers ready to convert.

With the right Paid Search advertising agency by your side, Search Ads can reach your key customers at exactly the right time: when they’re searching for the products or services you offer and are ready to convert. Yep, search advertising gets you in front of users that are ready to splurge so you can put their cash directly in your pocket.

If you’re looking to reap the rewards of search engine advertising, our experts can help. With over 60 years of combined experience, our PPC team have mastered keyword targeting and bidding to help you make more of what we all love: money.

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Search engine advertising the Dark Horse way

Our approach as a Search engine advertising agency is simple – effective keyword targeting, data-driven bid setting and strong, compelling ad copy. Once you’re up and running, we’ll test, monitor and analyse performance to get you as many clicks and conversions as possible. Our services include:

  • Getting forensic: Any Paid Search advertising agency worth their salt will start by auditing your Search Ad strategy. We look at your current keyword lists, bidding approach and targeting options to identify your strengths, weaknesses and opportunities. Data-led. It’s how we roll
  • Keyword research: We use industry-leading tools to create lists of keywords you should be targeting to get your ads seen by the right people at the right time
  • Bid setting and targeting options: We balance your budget with predicted costs per click to get you the best return on ad spend. We’ll set bids that get you seen without wasting your cash and specify target locations and audiences to reach your intended users
  • Monitoring and analysing performance: Like we said – data is everything. We let the numbers do the talking and adjust our strategy accordingly, increasing bids where necessary and removing keywords that aren’t converting
  • Reports and insights: Honesty and transparency. It’s the Dark Horse way. We give you full visibility on how campaigns are performing, so you know what converts best and where your focus should be
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Why do Search Ads with Dark Horse

This is who we are, plain and simple:

  • Industry experts – Our PPC team has 60+ years of combined jam-hot experience. We don’t use juniors or trainees. We actively discriminate on experience and brains. Guilty. Google Premier Partners with a proven track record. You can take that to the bank
  • No toss stats – You have full visibility in what we do, and we tell you how it is. Zero prattle or pompous exaggerated reports, just positive trendlines on your bank balance
  • Drum recommended or award-winning – That would be a ridiculous reason to select a Paid Search advertising agency. Any company can be Drum recommended by paying that £1000 per year for the logo and getting three (just three) of your mates to vouch for you. Business awards cost £2000 for a table of 10. This is sponsorship
  • Personality – You can have all the case studies in the world but if you’re an arse of a company with an unwilling attitude then it’s game over. Sensible, smart, nice people is what is required here. Reasonable. Not just thinking about their margin. We want to tell other agencies to stick their “banked hours” where the sun doesn’t shine
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Paid Ad campaign management from the experts. Our PPC masterminds are here to dominate ad space on search result pages and crush your competition. Let us make you lots of cash – oodles of it.

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Search advertising FAQs

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What is Paid Search advertising?
What is Paid Search advertising? - Expand

When you type a phrase into a search engine, two types of results will appear: the organic ones and the paid ones above it. Those paid results (you know the ones we mean – they have ‘Ad’ in front of them) are generated by Paid Search advertising.

When a user clicks on a Paid ad, they’re taken to the advertiser’s website and the advertiser then has to pay a fee.

How does Search advertising work?
How does Search advertising work? - Expand

In Search advertising, businesses bid on specific keywords that they want their ads to appear for in search result pages. If you sell skincare products, for example, you might want your ad to be displayed when someone searches for ‘face cream’ or ‘moisturiser’. You can use search advertising to bid on those phrases and appear at the top of search results for those keywords.

We know what you’re thinking – if everyone bids on that keyword, how will my ad be at the top? Well, the order in which ads are displayed is determined by both the bid amount (the amount of money you’re willing to pay each time someone clicks on your ad) and the quality score (how relevant and useful your ad is to the user).

Why use Paid Search advertising?
Why use Paid Search advertising? - Expand

Search ads are particularly effective because they allow you to target specific keywords and reach potential customers when they are most likely to be interested in the products or services you’re advertising. By carefully selecting and targeting the right keywords and using strong ad copy, you can use Paid Search advertising to drive traffic to your websites and increase sales.

Want to create an effective keyword strategy and write compelling ad copy that will force search engines to take notice and feature your ad in the top spot? Use a Paid Search advertising agency like Dark Horse to build a Search ad strategy that crushes your competition.

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What are Dynamic Search Ads?

With Dynamic Search Ads (aka DSAs), you don’t create or manage a list of keywords for your ads. Instead, the search engine automatically matches your website with relevant searches and generates an ad for a specific page on your website.

Say you sell shoes, and someone searches for ‘silver high heels’, the search engine would create an ad for your page featuring silver high heels, using the content on that page to write a compelling headline and description. If the user then clicked through, they’d be taken straight to the relevant page on site. They’re a great way of supplementing your traditional Search ad strategy.

What are Responsive Search Ads?

Responsive Search Ads (or RSAs) involve creating different variations of the same ad (using multiple headlines and descriptions) so a search engine can combine these variations, test different combinations and track which performs best.

We can then use this data to improve future performance and get more users to site.

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How to advertise on search engines

Paid Search advertising can be managed through various platforms:

  • Google ads: Offered by (you guessed it) Google. You can use it to run ads on Google search results pages and other websites that are part of the Google Ads Network
  • Bing ads: Use this to run ads on Bing and Yahoo search results pages
  • Amazon advertising: Allows you to run sponsored product ads on Amazon (though, we’ll be honest, we don’t cover this offering just yet)

How much does Search Engine advertising cost?

The cost of Search Engine advertising varies depending on the competitiveness of the keywords being targeted, the bid amount and the quality score of the ad. In general, more competitive keywords tend to have higher bid amounts, as there is more demand for those keywords and more advertisers competing for them.

Your chosen agency (*cough cough* Dark Horse) can help you plan out an effective bidding strategy to get the best return on investment and line your pockets with gold. If you have any more questions, feel free to contact the experts at our Paid Search advertising agency directly. We can also help with Paid Social and SEO.

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