Search Ads 101: Everything you Need to Know //

Paid search advertising (also known as pay per click) is one of the most common forms of pay-per-click (PPC), advertising. This involves companies paying search engines to show their ads higher up on relevant search engine result pages (SERPs) with the goal of driving traffic towards their landing pages.

How do paid search advertisements work? And what are the costs of paid search advertising? Let’s begin by defining paid search advertising.

What is paid-search advertising?

Paid advertising is based on an auction-based PPC system to display digital ads on search engine result pages like Google, and Bing. Your bid and quality score will determine how often your ads appear and where they rank, as well as the cost per click.

You first bid on a placement in the SERPs. This involves setting your maximum bid (your bid) as well as the maximum budget you are willing to spend on the campaign (your budget). After you have created an ad, and connected it to a landing webpage, each search engine ad platform will calculate a Quality Score for the purpose of determining its position. This is a great indicator of the relevancy of your keywords, ads, destination page, or landing page.

What is a paid-search ad?

Paid ads appear above and below organic results on major search platforms such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. These ads contain three main components a headline, display URL and description text. They are convincing users to click. Apple Search Ads appear above the App Store results on both iPhone and iPad. Text ads can include extensions that provide additional information to your ad.

Headline

Because it contains the most text, the headline of an ad is the first thing viewers notice. To draw attention to high-intent searchers, it is important to include relevant keywords. These are the three main search engines.

Two headlines each, up to 30 characters each (however, on Yahoo you can choose only one headline. The character limit for is 50 ).

This Simplified Ad was presented by Google’s search for “easy social networking management”.

The headline of the second ad is much more optimized than that of the first. This version is more relevant for the search query (with all the search phrases in the title) and contains two calls-to-action (“learn” or “get started”.

Display URL

The display URL displays your website address in green below the headline. It includes the URL from your last URL as well as optional subdomains and path fields that provide more information to searchers about where they will land once they click.

Each display URL can contain up to 35 characters. The main difference is that Bing display URLs can contain up to 35 characters.

Description Text

Description text highlights the most important information about your product or service, and why search engines should click through. Google Ads and Bing Ads can have up to 80 characters in description text. Yahoo has up to 150 characters.

Grin’s Yahoo Ad makes full use of the 150 characters limit. The ad copy highlights their product features.

Extensions for ads

Your message will be displayed in more results if you use ad extensions. This can have a huge impact considering that space is very limited.

Digital advertisers can use these add-ons to give more information about their products or services, such as location and phone number. These formats include location information and maps as well as click-to-call buttons and reviews. sitelink extensions are also available. They increase visibility of your ads and Google reports that click-through rates for ads have increased by several percentage points.

This is Gleap’s Google Ad. It has two sitelink extensions: one to their pricing page, and one to their 14 day free trial.

Pay-per-click marketing has many benefits

1. Increase visibility

While optimizing your website organically may eventually bring your brand to number one in search results, paid search advertising can help you get there quickly. Paid search advertising is key to getting your website in front of high-intent prospects, regardless if you are a small business or an established company.

2. Traffic increases

Organic optimizations may eventually lead to increased page traffic. Paid ads can bring you traffic immediately. There is no waiting to see an increase in traffic. This is especially true for companies that are new to the market and those who target specific organic terms they don’t rank for.

3. High-interest prospects

Paid search ads are targeted at specific search queries so people who see them will be searching for solutions similar to yours. They aren’t just randomly surfing the internet; they’re more likely to be interested in your product or service in the near future.

4. Detailled analytics

Search engines such as the big three offer marketers free analytics and real-time data. This allows you to analyze your prospects and campaigns, and what you are getting from paid searches. The following are some of the most valuable analytics:

• Geographically where a prospect is located
• What kind of device are they using to search?
• Which pages did they visit on your site?
• What time did they spend on your site?

These details will help you optimize your campaigns frequently to ensure that your advertising dollars are being used to their maximum potential.

Pay search ads can increase your conversion rates

Paid search advertising is a powerful strategy for generating brand awareness, leads and sales. Targeted ads can increase the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns. They also work well when paired with an optimized landing webpage.

Instapage allows digital marketers to create landing pages that are both user-friendly and effective. It features a designer-friendly builder, team collaboration with Instablocks(tm), advanced analytics and more. Get a 14-day free trial.

Author: Stephanie Mialki