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Search Engine Advertising

What is Search Engine Advertising?

Getting ranked on Google, the biggest and most used search engine on the planet, is critical to a company's success. Any marketer worth their salt will tell you that if you don't show up on Google's page 1, it's as if your company doesn't exist. That's because statistically speaking, a measly 10% of searchers go beyond page 1 on Google and, for that matter, on all other search engines.

However, getting ranked on page 1 of Google is not as easy as it sounds. A lot of work, diligence, and amazing content is needed to reach the top. For some companies, the journey takes too long and costs too much. Enter OpenText, a Canadian-based search engine and the first to host pay-per-click (PPC) ads way back in 1996. These PPC ads were the very first example of what is now known as SEA; Search Engine Advertising.

Today SEA is a valuable cog in the wheel of search engine marketing (SEM) and online marketing in general. At its core, SEA consists of any ad a company pays to display on the Google (and Bing, and Yahoo) results page when someone performs an online search. SEA is a faster, albeit costly, method of getting your company seen by the millions of folks who use Google daily to search for whatever they need. Depending on the product or service you offer, your website, and the price you're willing to pay, Google will display your search engine ads on page 1. There they will be seen by the 90% of users who never move on to page 2. (Google's own AdWords is one of the most popular SEA networks, which we'll talk about below.)

Search engine advertising is a particularly effective marketing method as long as the company running the ads knows what its core customers are searching for and aligns its ad with their search queries. The reason is that when consumers search for something in a search engine, they are very specific about what they want and use specific words in the search bar. These words reveal many things about the searcher that a business can take advantage of to reach them with the SEA ads.

In short, search engine advertising is a way to pay for ads that will show up on Google's highest page and do it much more quickly than if you had to wait for your SEO tactics to kick in. It's not a way to rank your page or content, per se, but your page rank is almost beside the point if you get the desired results.

How Does Search Engine Advertising Work?

While it might seem that search engine advertising is relatively straightforward, that couldn't be further from the truth. There are several factors that, even if you've paid for SEA ads, will determine when and where your ad will be displayed. Below we'll break down how it all works using Google's AdWords as an example.

First, SEA is cut from the same cloth as an auction, with advertisers bidding on the keywords they want to use that are the most relevant to the products and services they're manufacturing and selling. However, one factor that's different is that the highest bidder doesn't always get the keywords they desire. Instead, Google AdWords looks at the site that the advertiser will be using for their keyword(s) to determine which of them is the most suited to said keywords. AdWords checks, for example, the site's relevance, how the keywords are displayed on the site, and, maybe most importantly, what searchers have done when they've reached the site. Google then gives each site a score based on several factors, including:

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors to a particular domain who leave (bounce) from the domain before clicking to another of its pages. A high bounce rate usually indicates that the domain isn't providing the answers or information the searcher is looking for, thus causing them to bounce from the page quickly.

Time-on-Page

Time-on-page, as its name suggests, is the amount of time the average visitor spends on a particular site's pages. Google calculates the Time-on-page based on every page a domain contains. The numbers are calculated starting when the visitor arrives and ending when they click on another page on the same domain. When this happens, a trigger on Google instantly calculates how much time the visitor spent on the previous page.

Conversion Rates

Conversion rate refers to the number of visitors to a page who have converted from a visitor into a customer or client by completing some type of action while on the domain. The archetypical action is, of course, to purchase a service or product. However, conversion rates are also calculated based on visitors who, for example, clicked an ad on the domain, filled in a form, or left their contact information.

Once Google AdWords has all this information, it will rank the site. Google gives each factor a score of 1 (irrelevant) to 10 (highly relevant) based on all three factors regarding the keywords the domain has bid on. (This is why keyword research is essential when using SEA.)

One last factor Google looks at is the bidding history of the keyword(s) in question. A popular keyword will cost more than one searched for less frequently. With all this info in place, Google gives the domain a final "Quality Score." They then use this Score and the max bid the advertiser made to determine where Google will place their ads on their search engine.

What is the Search Engine Advertisement Auction?

The search engine advertisement auction, as we've already discussed a little, is rather straightforward once a domain has been scored. During the auction, which happens hundreds of thousands of times a day, Google uses this formula to determine a domain's SERP (Search Engine Results Page):

• Maximum Bid x Quality Score = Ad Rank

Below is a basic look at a single search engine advertising auction.

Advertiser Maximum Bid Quality Score Ad Rank Position

Advertiser #1 $2.00 10 20 2

Advertiser #2 $4.00 4 16 3

Advertiser #3 $8.00 8 36 1

Advertiser #4 $6.00 2 10 4

Notice how, even though they are bidding less than the rest, Advertiser #2 still has the enviable 2nd position. That's because they have a domain Quality Score of 10 for the keyword they are bidding on. Advertiser #4, even though they are bidding 3 times as much, is still in 4th position because their domain's Quality Score for the keyword is abysmally low. The same can be said for Advertiser #2, who is bidding double #1 but has a Quality Score of 4 compared to #1's 10. Advertiser #3 is in the 1st position due to their high bid and the fact that they also have a high Quality Score, an envious combination if you can afford it.

Search Engine Advertising Example

There are millions, if not billions, of search engine advertising examples on Google, Bing, and Yahoo. They are there 24/7, 365, popping up in Google and the rest based on the keywords you type into your browser or mobile device. Indeed, to get to this page today and read this information about SEA, you likely saw at least one, if not several, SEA ads with your own eyes. To give you an example, however, we'll use the keywords "men's running shoes" on Google.

When we typed in "men's running shoes," Google gave us 148 million results in less than a second. Right at the very top of Page 1, there were not 1 but 2 search engine ads. The first was from Adidas and the 2nd from Amazon. The rest of the results on that particular page 1 of Google were all organic results, but that can change based on what keywords are used. For example, when we typed "women's running shoes," the Google results were slightly different. On top of page 1, there was another SEA ad, but an organic search result was underneath. We did another search for "children's educational toys," and the first 4 results were SEA ads, which shows the high popularity of that market sector.

One thing to note is that, on Google, SEA ads are placed either above or below "organic" search results based on their rank and position (as we looked at earlier). Also, if you click on the so-called "kebab menu" next to each ad and search result, it immediately tells you which it is, an ad or an organic result. Furthermore, a SEA ad will have the word "Ad" or "Ads" nest to it so that you can immediately tell if it's an ad or an organic result.

The Benefits of Search Engine Advertising

Besides the fact that a business can pay to have their ad(s) show on page 1 of Google and the other search engines, search engine advertising has several other excelled not benefits. Let's take a closer look at all of them:

More Potent User Intent

User intent relates to what the searcher is looking for when they go to Google, Yahoo, and the rest. That's good news because searchers know more or less exactly what they're looking for, which allows you to target your ads precisely. That also means your ads are much less intrusive to their search experience and, in some cases, even welcomed. The higher the user intent, the more likely the conversion.

Measurable Analytics

All search engines provide incredibly useful analytics and real-time data regarding their ads. These analytics allow your company to track, measure, and gauge a variety of highly informative data, including:

• Cost-per-click (CPC)

• Click-through rate (CTR)

• Conversion rate

• Time-on-page

• What pages on your domain are most popular

• The total number of impressions your domain has had

• The device searchers are using

• The average position of your ads

• The money you've spent vs. the money your ads have generated

Immediate (almost) Results

As you probably know, there's a very limited amount of space on the #1 page of any results page, and getting ranked so that you sit on that page takes a lot of time, energy, and SEO. With search engine advertising, you can skip to the front of the line, so to speak, and get to page 1 much faster.

Easy Implementation

You can set up a search engine advertising campaign quite quickly and, some would say, easily. (It gets easier as you get more experience.) Indeed, an experienced advertiser can put a well-organized SEA campaign together in an afternoon, and, even better, it can be tweaked, configured, and changed on the fly. And check this out; once you've created a SEA campaign on Google, you can import it as-is to Bing and run it immediately with a few simple clicks, saving you a ton of time and effort!

Search Engine Advertising (SEA) vs. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The difference between search engine advertising (SEA) and search engine optimization (SEO) is simple; SEA is paid advertising that gets you to the top of a search engine right away, while SEO uses organic, non-paid methods to do the same thing. One other difference is that SEO takes longer, and in some cases much longer, than SEA. That's the main reason many companies use SEA because they get results faster.

Final Thoughts

Search engine marketing has been around almost as long as the modern internet and is used by hundreds of thousands of businesses to get more consumer eyes on their products and services faster. By paying to have their ads placed on Google and the other search engines and in enviable positions, companies big and small can jump to the head of the line, attract searchers to their domain, and, most importantly, make a conversion and sale. One caveat, however, is that you must have a high-quality domain with excellent, engaging content using the keywords you wish to target. Without that, even the best SEA campaigns can fall flat on their face.

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