In this interview with Patricia Tan, Global Head of SEM and CRO at Canva takes us through the central role of Google Ads in their digital marketing strategy. Learn from one of Australia’s biggest global success stories how you can reach not only more customers – but the right ones.

When you’re looking to buy a product or service and type it into Google, the results at the top of the page are typically ads. The businesses that appear there have bid on keywords for a chance to show up exactly at the moment that you’re searching.

Welcome to the world of search engine marketing (SEM).

It’s different to the more familiar search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy, which involves content being found organically in search results. That’s an important online marketing tool itself, but the optimisation process takes a while to get right. Google Ads, which is SEM, lets you reach customers more immediately and customise your campaign on the fly.

Patricia Tan, head of SEM and CRO (conversion rate optimisation) at online visual communications platform Canva makes a photography analogy.

“SEO is like film photography – it takes some time to set up and develop, but the end result is beautiful and always worth the effort,” she explains. “SEM is a little more like smartphone photography – it’s quick, flexible, and will help you capture that moment in an instant with great results.”

Using SEM to complement SEO

Canva entered the marketplace in 2013 with a big, hairy, audacious goal of making design accessible to everyone.

Facing stiff competition from well-established competitors, the company has used SEM to complement its SEO strategy.

“Google Ads are critical because you’re capturing demand when potential customers have an immediate need for your product or business,” Patricia tells Kochie’s Business Builders.

“For example, if someone searches for ‘logo design’ on Google, that person is saying ‘I want to design a logo and I need some help’. Designing a logo is something you can easily do with Canva, so we bid on that keyword so they know that we can help them with what they’re looking for. To get your product in front of people, you need to be there when they need you, or you can be sure that your competitors will be.

“SEM allows us to complement our SEO strategy by giving us the ability to quickly drive traffic and brand awareness across key search terms or categories that we might not be ranking for organically. With SEM, you get incremental traffic and clicks from users who might not know you or have the patience to scroll a little further to find your organic listing.”

Watch: Patricia Tan on Canva’s secrets to Search success

Post continues after Kochie’s Business Builders video.

Lessons from a recent SEM campaign

Canva found SEM particularly helpful when it launched its video editor last year. “Video editing is a competitive category to cut through with well-established market leaders and multiple alternative products in the market,” says Patricia. “We also knew that it was probably going to take a while for our SEO pages to start ranking.”

The company needed a quick way to help Canva appear among the existing players any time someone was searching for video-editing related terms. “We launched SEM campaigns as a quick way to build our presence in the video editing category, capture traffic and customers,” says Patricia.

When launching its video editor, Canva stayed focused on the intent and need of the customer and how the company could help them stand out and tell their story with videos. “We built out an extensive list of keywords in combination with dynamic search ads which allowed us to reach people looking to edit or make a video,” says Patricia.

How to make Google Ads work for you

The beauty of SEM is that it can work for businesses of any size, not just billion-dollar unicorns like Canva.

“Google Ads is the best channel to start with if you’re just starting out in your paid advertising journey as a business,” says Patricia, who has been working in SEM for more than 10 years. “You know that the money you’re spending on SEM is actually driving revenue and customers for your business.”

Google Ads uses a bidding system where you’re in control of setting your budget and how much you’re willing to pay per click from a potential customer.

For a responsive search ad, you choose the keywords you want to target and set up campaigns with several headlines and short descriptions based on those. Google tests which combinations perform best to optimise your campaign for better results.

Alternatively, you can set up a dynamic search ad, which doesn’t require keywords. Instead, when a user types in a query, the system generates an ad for you based on the most relevant page of your website that matches the searcher’s intent.

The proof for Canva is in the pudding. Google Ads is its biggest marketing channel. “We see a 3:1 ROI [return on investment] from our Google search campaigns while continuing to double our growth in new users and revenue,” says Patricia.

Find out more about how Google Ads can help your business here.

This article is brought to you by Kochie’s Business Builders in partnership with Google Ads.