Making your online store have its own niche in the world of digital marketing, with the great competition that exists, is complicated to say the least. However, it is not an impossible task since we have different tools and many platforms at our disposal that make the task easier. Some of those are Google Adwords or Facebook Ads. Both work in very different ways and can provide support for tasks such as email marketing and other similar actions.

These tools facilitate the use of ads to attract traffic, promote the brand, among others. This is what is known as paid media. What we are going to talk about in this post is how interesting a paid media or SEA strategy can be.

What is SEA?

Within the digital marketing sector, the term SEA is not one of the best known. At least it's not as bad as SEO. As you may already know, SEO is responsible for optimizing websites and online stores to conform to search engine algorithms in terms of technical aspects and content.

SEO is key and irreplaceable. The most organic base from which we can grow an online business, ensuring that engines like Google or Bing have it as a reference site. Being well positioned is a very big door from which we can start to get good volumes of traffic.

But let's continue with the SEA, it is often confused with the SEM. But the truth is that SEM encompasses SEO and SEA. Let's see what the acronyms of each one mean and understand it better.

SEM = Search Engine Marketing or search engine marketing, and includes:

• SEO = Search Engine Optimization (content optimization to attract traffic from search engines)
• SEA= Search Engine Advertising (content optimization for paid media)

We would call SEA in Spanish paid search engine advertising. Pay close attention to the word "paid", since you will always have to pay the search engine on which you want to appear and carry out any strategy. In short, in order to develop an ambitious or modest SEA strategy, you will always have to go through the Google Shopping or Bing checkout.

What's more, SEA - search optimization in paid media, is the main source of income for the different search engines.

But what does the SEA consist of?

Surely you have ever done a search for a product in an engine and seen that those items appear in different stores without having to enter them, right on the search page itself, as we see in the example image.

Those are the SEA ads. They may appear in the form of text or images, depending on the services contracted. But what you should always be clear about is that they will appear just when users or potential clients do their search in an engine, without having the need to enter the different online stores.

The only drawback that we can find when developing an SEA strategy is obvious: it is not cheap. Google or Bing, to name two of the most powerful and most used engines, have different quotas for this type of service. Don't forget that, as we have mentioned, this is the main source of income for search engines.

The advantages of SEA

We have been telling you that this strategy has many advantages, but we have not yet shown you what they are, so let's start with this now.

There is one important thing to keep in mind. Although SEA and SEO are different disciplines and go on separate paths, SEA, if carried out effectively, has a positive impact on SEO strategies. This is an indirect advantage, but it can make any investment much more profitable.

Let's look at some of the advantages that creating SEA strategies for your online store can offer.

• The first direct advantage of SEA is that it allows complete control of the advertising displayed. The ads that appear on Google or Bing have a pre-established format that links to a landing page, but they will always have the image you want.
• You will be able to properly organize your campaigns on Google or other platforms. That is, you can work with the engine in which the ads are going to be presented so that they appear exactly on the dates on which you want them to do so, so you have a great option to chronologically schedule any campaign for your potential customers.
• The last great advantage is the benefit you will receive in terms of brand image . Normally, users tend to associate the companies that appear in the top Google ads with completely trustworthy firms and important companies.

Thus, the SEA can help you so that the name of your company is completely related to this idea that many users have, something that can bring you even more benefits than what the SEA strategy alone gives you. Thus, it not only provides traffic through paid media, but, as a consequence, it will provide attributes of brand image and trust for users.

The SEA in Adwords and Facebook Ads 

Surely you know in one way or another the Google platform that is used to manage all the advertising that its search engine moves. This platform is Adwords and it is, from this, where you have to bid to make a space for yourself.

Google Adwords will give you several options to create your SEA campaign. From a classic text ad to spots in ad playlists, or what is known as display marketing, although this service is offered through AdSense, it is also a Google product. Google Adwords is based on a bidding system, where the element for which you bid are the keywords and the places to display your ads.

For its part, Facebook Ads is the tool that gives you the opportunity to show yourself on the scroll of this social network. With this tool you will have access to similar audiences on Facebook to those you would get on Google or Bing, but the social network provides a closeness that is usually even more effective than that achieved with SEA campaigns in search engines.

In order to take advantage of the SEA strategies you consider, it is important to work with data. A good way to do this is to follow a data-driven methodology. With this, you can evaluate all the information generated by potential users and those who are already users in your online store. This way we can know and analyze how they behave and how you can better approach them.

Data-driven consists of interpreting the data obtained. This raw information that is collected from potential customers is full of secrets and opportunities that we can extract to anticipate consumer behaviors, achieving an improvement in the sales of your online store and an improvement in the conversion rate. Keep in mind that investing in SEA is important, which is why it is essential to know from the first moment how to achieve the best results based on objective information. This is how every euro invested in SEA will have a good return.

Some of the most important KPIs that we must take into account for accounting when we are going to plan strategies and measure the results of the strategies are:

• CPC - Cost per Click
• CPM - Cost per thousand impressions
• CPA - Cost per acquisition

We can find all this information in our own Google Adwords account or even in Google Analytics.

In short, digital marketing gives you the option of SEA so that you can grow your online store through Google Adwords and the rest of the platforms that are dedicated to providing this type of service.

It may interest you

• How to define your e-commerce objectives
• How to create a customer journey map in your online store
• How to use Google My Business for your e-commerce & Shopify