This guide is, quite simply, everything I know about paid search.

It's everything I've learnt from years managing paid search campaigns agency-side, in-house and freelance.

As such, it's a pretty long guide. Go ahead and bookmark it now; you're unlikely to finish it in one sitting.

This article isn't going to improve your account's RoAS by 50%, double your volume, whiten your teeth, help you find singles near you, or any of the vacuous promises that most marketing guides make.

What this guide will give you, however, is very fundamental understanding of all the ingredients that go into a successful paid search strategy. It takes a foundational approach; it won't tell you a list of tricks to improve your account, but it will help you understand how to come up with those tricks yourself.

Auctions

Understanding auctions is crucial to understanding paid search. In this article, we walk through everything about how they work.

Account Structure

Getting your account structure right is perhaps the most important thing you can do when running paid search. So, what's the best way to structure an account?

Keywords

Keywords are perhaps the most fundamental part of a paid search account. So how do they work, what different types are there, and which should you use?

Ads are one of the core parts of a paid search account. So how do they work, what are they made up of, and how do you build good ads?

Ad Groups

Ad group structure is one of the core aspects of a paid search account. So how do ad groups work, what are they made up of, and how do you build them optimally?

Next Up

With that out of the way, let's start with the 'genesis' of paid search; auctions.

How do auctions work?

mack grenfell

forecasting

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Paid search strategy, from first principles

Contents