How to Make Paid Search Advertising Easier to Understand [Fun and Easy Steps Everyone Can Follow!]

Have you ever wondered what paid search advertising is and wanted to know more about it? Then you have come to the right place! Not only will I tell you more about it, but I will also help to make it easier for you to understand so that it will become second nature to you!

Paid Search Advertising

What is paid search advertising? According to AdRoll, it is a marketing tactic in which advertisers pay search engines for ad placements on SERPs and SERP stands for Search Engine Results Pages which means anything that shows up on a web page when you are searching for something on the internet.

When it comes to figuring out where your advertisements are going to be placed on SERPs, there are 6 different things that help determine its placement.

1. Bids
2. Ad & Landing Page Quality
3. Ad thresholds
4. Popularity of Keywords
5. Context of Search
6. Impact of Ad Extension
   

Bids

For a bid, it works like an auction between businesses. Each business bids on keywords and phrases that relate to their products and services. How they work is by PPC, which stands for pay-per-click and the businesses only have to pay money when someone clicks on their advertisement.

Ad & Landing Page Quality

Ad & landing page quality. With how smart phones are a thing this day in age, the more mobile-friendly a website is, the better quality score it gets especially with how relevant and useful Google considers it to be. If you know how to create a website with HTML and CSS, then I would say you're golden!

Ad Thresholds

For ad thresholds, there is not a whole lot I'll be able to explain about it, but I'll try my best to teach you about it. The ad quality, ad position, user signals and attributes, topic and nature of a search result, and related auctions are all part of ad thresholds. I believe this is all of what makes up an advertisement and each part should be taken seriously when you are considering how your audience will see your finished advertisements on the internet because those ads will reflect how they see your company.

Popularity of Keywords

In terms of the popularity of a keyword you have added to your advertisement and website, if another advertisement has the same exact keyword, then it all comes down to who can pay more money for it because that higher bidder will win the auction at that point.

Not only does Google take into account what you are searching, but it also is considering how and where you are searching. What I mean is is that your location, time, search term, what type of device you are on, what the nature of your search is, what other advertisements are competing with you, and search results from your search are taken into account to help you get the best result they believe you were looking for.

Ad Extensions

Ad extensions are very helpful in ways that you would have not ever thought of before. There are many different extensions that do many different things. According to HubSpot, here's how they describe each extension. There's the call out extension which allows customers to highlight specific points about a person's business, products, or services that can be shown alongside the company's advertisement on a Google search. A site link extension is what appears beneath your text ads and directs users to specific pages on your website. An example of one might be a "Buy now" link to a product that shows up as a result on Google. A price extension shows prices of products or services to help make informed decisions about the product or service. This might also include showing the availability of a product currently and the rating along with how many ratings it has.

The location extension provides an extra line in your businesses advertisement and highlights where your businesses location is. Structured snippet extensions are provided by the advertiser, but show information in a structured format that they show with your advertisement. Promotion extensions are what make it easy for a business to keep up with their promotions without having to create a whole new advertisement. The good things that paid search advertising brings to fruition are that there are always high-intent audiences. In other words, no matter what keyword you might try researching on the internet, there will always be a way to reach the type of audience you desire. You save money when making your advertisements because the market is what dictates the price for ads. Lastly, you'll start seeing results right away since there's no need for you to persuade any new customers online since you'll be the one giving them a shorter path to checkout.

How to Successfully Master Ad Copy & Ad Creative with Targeted Advertising [Fun and Easy to Accomplish]

To start off, targeted advertising is not as hard to learn as you might think. It is actually quite easy to master and understand. The main thing you just need to look out for is what type of advertisement are you trying to make? There are different types that I will help explain to you to make it easier to understand the difference.

Demographic Advertisements

All of the different types of advertisements I talk about are from HubSpot. The first type is demographic. Demographic advertisements are a collection and analysis of general characteristics about groups of people and populations. This can be where you choose the age, location, language, and income of each advertisement and that advertisement will be focused towards that group of individuals. This happens because you are making your advertisement more specific towards the group you want to advertise to. What makes this type of advertisement great is that it can be directed towards specific regions, it can be tailored to the ad copy you made, and it definitely reaches your ideal customers. Lastly, demographic targeting works best at the awareness stage since you are working with a new audience and you do not have a whole lot of information besides what you have collected so far.

Behavioral Advertisements

The second type of advertising is behavioral targeting. This is a method that allows advertisers and publishers to display relevant ads and marketing messages to users based on their web browsing behavior. The examples of these are actually quite common, but we just never knew that they were tied to behavioral advertisements. They are previous search terms, how much time you spend on a page, the content you interact with on the webpage, and the last time you visited the website. In a way, you can think of how Google search works. When you search for something on the internet, you receive lots of results over multiple pages and even when you get the exact result you wanted, other websites will offer themselves too because they think you want to visit their website too. Basically, anything you do on the internet, like visiting a website, viewing a pricing page, a business you purchased something from before, those can be targeted towards your behavioral advertisement.

Contextual Advertisements

The last one is called contextual advertising. This one you see all the time. These advertisements are placed anywhere a website owner wants on their webpage based on the content of those webpages. There's not much more I can say to explain it since we see examples of these every day, but here they are. It can be shown as a sponsored ad on publication websites, display ads on website pages, and native ads in video form and info graphics. This advertisement is also the most effective at the awareness stage too because of needing to find the right audience.

There is a slight difference between contextual and behavioral targeting that you should keep in mind. Behavioral ads show up based on online behavior while contextual ads only utilize keywords and topics from user searches on the web.

Putting Everything Together!

To help sum up what I have just talked about so far, think of an upside down pyramid. The way that this website, thenextad.io, uses the pyramid is actually quite interesting. Going from the top part, which is bigger, to the bottom, the smaller part, we start off with "Not Aware". If this is your first advertisement for your company, then this is where you'll begin at. The next part is "Aware". People know what your brand is now, but they aren't sure if they want to buy anything from you yet. This may also indicate that you need to work on your visual appeal in your advertisements more to make them more convincing to buy. This is also called an ad creative which is the visual attributes of the creative object that is your digital ad. The last part is called "Direct Leads". With this part, people know who you are and definitely have an intention to buy a product from you.

At this point, you may be asking "How does this tie into ad copy and ad creative?" Well, if you put both of these topics together, you can create a very compelling advertisement that nobody can look away from (depending on the content).

First, what is an ad copy? Ad copy is text that is in the form of an advertising message that is aimed at catching and holding the interest of the prospective buyer. When you see an advertisement online, you will usually read one line that catches your attention and makes you want to click it to read more about it. That's an ad copy line. To make ad copies more simple and easy to understand, try to avoid using abbreviations and acronyms because not everyone will catch what you are throwing at them. It also helps to shorten your sentences so they aren't too long to read.

After you put all of these ideas together, I have no doubt you will be able to create a great advertisement towards the audience that you want and have fun while doing it.