If you are new to the world of search marketing or simply want a clear explanation of some common digital tools and terms, you are in the right place.
Here we take a look at Google Ads (formerly known as Google AdWords): Google’s advertising service, which lets you place pages from your website in paid search engine results (SERP).
You do not have to wait for a new website to rise organically to the top of the rankings. With paid search, you can see immediate results, and it is not as difficult or expensive to use as you might think.
Paid search
Paid search is the term we use for advertising within search engine results. These ads usually appear at the top of the SERP or along the side, and increasingly resemble organic results. Google currently marks them with a small green Ad label.
Google is not the only search engine where this is possible; Bing also runs its own advertising network, called The Bing Network.
For the purposes of this article, however, we will focus on Google Ads. Let’s take a closer look at how it works.
Basic principles of Google Ads
In short, you choose a set of keywords that a user might search for on Google, then create an ad that will appear on the SERP based on those keywords.
Of course, you probably will not be the only company that wants to show ads to people who use those terms. Competing companies can bid on the same search term.
If you want your ad to appear, you have to bid against other advertisers on how much you are willing to pay Google Ads each time a user clicks on your ad.
The more you pay per click, the more likely your ad is to appear in search results. This is why paid search is often called PPC, which stands for Pay-Per-Click.
However, unlike many real-time bidding models, the highest bid is not the only factor taken into account. To determine how high your ad appears in the SERP and whether it will be shown at all, Google assigns it a rating called Ad Rank.
What is Ad Rank?
Ad Rank is the metric Google uses to determine the order in which paid search ads appear in the SERP.
As stated in Google Ads help documentation:
“In general, the ad with the highest Ad Rank appears in the first position, the ad with the second-highest Ad Rank appears in the second position, and so on, provided the ads meet the relevant thresholds.”
The bid amount is only one of the five factors that influence Ad Rank. Other factors include:
- The quality of your ads and landing page, reflected in your Quality Score
- The Ad Rank thresholds, meaning the quality requirements your ad must meet to be displayed. These may depend on the topic and nature of a search, the user’s location, and the device type
- Search context, including the query itself, the time of the search, the other ads and results that appear on the page, and user signals such as location and device type
- Ad extensions and other ad formats, which include extra information you can add, such as a phone number or additional links to pages on your website
Bidding
You pay Google Ads every time your ad is clicked. The amount you are willing to pay for each click is called cost per click (CPC).
You can choose a maximum bid, and if you enable the automatic option, Google can choose the bid amount for you within your budget, with the goal of generating as many clicks as possible.
There is also a less common option called cost per impression (CPM). In this case, you pay the search engine for every 1,000 times your ad appears in the SERP, whether or not the user clicks on it.
The time Google Ads needs to consider all advertisers bidding on a search term, decide whether an auction will take place, run that auction, calculate the best combination of maximum bid and quality score, and finally show the winning ad on the results page is roughly the same time it takes someone to type a search term into Google and receive the results. About 0.26 seconds.
Alternatives to Google Ads
Bing Network: Formerly known as the Yahoo Bing Network, the Bing Network is Bing’s advertising network and the main alternative to Google Ads. It includes several partners, such as AOL, The Wall Street Journal, and Gumtree.
According to Bing Ads statistics, the Bing Network currently reaches a meaningful share of the market in both the United States and the United Kingdom, which means it can help you reach users who may not be accessible through Google Ads alone.
Search engine optimization (SEO): this term refers to the methods, tactics, and processes used to increase the likelihood that your website will appear and rank well in organic, unpaid search engine results.
