Billions of searches happen every day in different search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex or DuckDuckGo. People are there looking for information, products, getting directions or learning something new. In addition to organic results on search results, the search engines include some paid page links as an advertisement, and this is the Paid Search.
Technically, Paid Search is an area inside the Search Engine Marketing (SEM) alongside Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and also part of the Pay-per-click advertisement category. The idea is to serve ads in Search Engine Result Page (SERP), another commonly used term to describe the result page for the search term or keyword used by the user.
To place your ad in these search results, you need an Ad Platform. Usually, each search engine has its tools like Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, Baidu Advertising or Yandex Advertising.
How do Paid Search works?
The Paid Search process can be explained in four major steps: search, eligibility, ranking and result.
- Search: a person performs a search in the search engine using a search term.
- Eligibility: a search throughout all active campaigns occurs to find qualified ads using keywords, location, budget and more as criteria.
- Ranking: quick auction analyses the bid and relevance of each ad for the search and qualify them in order of score.
- Result: the search engine fills the ad spaces on the result page and shows it to the user.
A search result page with the advertisement is created in a very complicated process and includes more than just the ad placement, but it’s incredibly fast and happens in less than a second.
Before you start
I recommend you to answer some questions before you start using Paid Search. They’ll help you to prepare your campaign and get the most of it.
Where do you want your ads seen?
Search engines have a broad audience, but each one has its niche, features and even some owned channels. Consider how important are the devices, as desktop, tablet and smartphone. Define the geographic location of your audience and which language they speak.
How much do you want to invest?
Based on your budget, define the amount of money you want to spend per day. For example, for a seasonal campaign, you can divide the budget by the total of days or for a continuous one, you can use your monthly budget to distribute by day. In general, Paid Search uses a pay-per-click method to charge, and I suggest you think about how much you feel comfortable to pay per each click.
What do you want to share in your ads?
Divide your messages into groups, so you can create different ad groups to answer each type of question in searches. The specs of each Ad Platform vary, but all of them have in common some ads aspects. For each ad group, you can define headlines, descriptions, URL and search terms.
How do you’ll measure success?
Think about what are the key performance indicators (KPIs) for this campaign and how you can measure them. Define performance indicators to help the business to evaluate the return of investment (ROI) and the marketing to optimize the campaign’s performance.
Right now, millions of people want to know, buy, go or do something and using the search on the internet to find their answers. Paid search can help them find you when they need you the most! Have you taken advantage of this opportunity?