Paid Search 101: What, Why, and How?
Search engine marketing is a way to promote your website through search engines. It involves getting your website listed in the paid listing section of the search engine results page (SERP). The web links with a label ‘Ad’ that you see at the top and bottom of the results page are paid search ads.
Unlike the organic listing, you need to pay search engines whenever a user clicks your website listing. It is also known as PPC (pay per click) or Paid Search Marketing.
Why Search Marketing Is Important?
You can reach people who are actively looking for you or the solution you provide. Unlike other platforms, people visit search engines only when they get a need to learn, find, or buy something. But when they visit platforms like Forbes, BBC, and ESPNCricInfo, users intend to read an article or to know about the latest happenings or to follow a cricket match.
So, if you’re selling shoes, the probability of selling it to someone searching for shoes is higher than just showing it to a user who follows a cricket match in ESPNCricinfo.
Basic Paid Search Terminology
Advertiser
A brand, product, service, or a person who is to be promoted.
Keyword
It is the phrase or word that a user enters in the search bar of the search engine.
Ad copy
Ad copy is the first interaction you make with your prospects. It serves the purpose to gain attention and prompt users to visit your website.
An ad copy is a compilation of Headlines (Blue Highlighted Text), Description (the short brief below it), and Display URL (the web link in green font).
Landing page
The web page where the user lands once after clicking your ad. It can be your digital store with a collection of products or a wall of informational text.
Adwords
A platform to manage, monitor, and report your search engine marketing activities. Every search engine has its own platform, Bing search has ‘Bing Ads’.
How Search Engine Marketing Works?
With so many businesses competing out there and willing to pay as much money as needed to get listed, search engines need to balance profitability and user experience. How would you react if you are searching for a smartphone, but shown a list of websites related to laptops just because they paid more? You will never return to Google or any other search engines, right?
So, to give a better user experience and a level playing field for advertisers, it conducts an auction process. It evaluates, scores, and ranks each advertiser ad copies.
Let’s assume I bid for the term ‘buy smartphone online’ and target users from Chennai with a language preference of Tamil. When a user searches for it,
Evaluation
The search engine gets the list of advertisers whoever have had bid for the user query ‘buy smartphone online’. Then, it evaluates and eliminates advertisers who don’t have enough money to spend and also those who have opted out by excluding the user location, language, time or IP address.
For e.g., If the user is from Chennai, whose language preference is Tamil. Then I am eligible for auction. For someone searching from outside of Chennai and don’t have Tamil as prefered language, I will be excluded.
Scoring
Each eligible list of advertiser’s ad copy is given with a quality score of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest. It scores based on how relevant the ad copy and landing page is to the user query. And how users have behaved to a particular ad copy in the past i.e. how often the users have clicked an ad in the past.
For. e.g., If I have an ad copy with the text “Buy Smartphones Online’’ in the Headline which links to a webpage having a collection of smartphones, then I will be considered more relevant. In addition, if users have interacted with my ad copy very often when shown, then it sends a signal that I’m not only relevant but also meets user expectation. Now, the probability of my ad copy getting a good score and outranking the competitor’s ad copies is higher.
Ranking
Finally, considering the bid and the quality score each ad copy is ranked, sorted and displayed in the search results page. Rank is nothing but the position at which your ad is shown.
Ad Rank = Quality Score * Bid
All these are done in real time for every user search. That’s the reason, sometimes you see ad copies getting shuffled when you hit the refresh button.
Popular Search Engines
Google, Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo, Baidu, AOL, Yandex.
Trivia
GoTo.com is the first web search engine to introduce pay per click and auction method which was later acquired by Yahoo. They even had a lawsuit against Google for patent infringement in 2002. It was settled when Google agreed to pay 2.7 million shares of common stock to Yahoo for the perpetual license.
P.S: This is the first of the paid search marketing 101 series. My next post will be about Keyword Research.
Originally published at elanchezhian.net
