Search Engine Advertising | Digital Marketing Tutorial

Background

Search Engine Advertising is a key topic in Digital Marketing. In it’s simplest form, Search Engine Advertising is the act of paying money to a crawler-based search engine in order to enhance the chances of your site being found by Web searchers when they perform specific search queries and/or visit specific information categories on that search engine or directory.

Also see my Search Engine Advertising Blog posts for the latest information on this subject.

Major Search Engine Advertising Categories:

Banner Ads

Paid Placement (CPC, PPC)

Contextual Advertising

One of the first forms of Search Engine Advertising was the familiar top-of-the-page banner ad. This type of ad is “served” to the visitor in one of several ways. The most common form is to serve the ad whenever a specific category is clicked on by the visitor/searcher.

This technique works best in directory-type Web sites where the information is divided into increasingly more specific sub-categories.

The ad could also be linked to specific words or phrases that, when searched for in that directory, would also return the banner ad at the top of the results page. In either case, clicking on that banner ad would take the visitor to the advertiser’s Web site, either to the home page or to a specific page designed to receive visitors from that ad.

Banner Ad Advertiser Costs

The advertiser pays a flat rate for the display of their ad in a cost per impression-based arrangement, typically in 1,000 impression increments called a “CPM (cost per thousand impressions) rate”.

The actual rate charged depended on the popularity of the category or search phrase – the more popular it was, the more the engine or directory charged the advertiser for each thousand ad impressions served.

Banner Ad Advertiser Logic

The underlying logic is simple, and embodies the basic concept for all Search Engine Advertising, regardless of the specific technique used – it’s all about relevance.

For example, if your site deals with golden retriever dog training, then you would want to have your banner ad served whenever a visitor went to that specific category in a directory, or to the closest category match in that directory if that specific category did not exist.

In other words, the goal is to present your ad to the visitors most likely to be interested in your product or service based on the specific category they visit and/or the phrase they search on.

Banner Ad Advertising Fading

Though not as popular as it once was, this type of ad is still very much in use. I think one of the reasons this type of advertising became less popular is that it tended to break the Search Engine Advertising golden rule – it has to be relevant. That is, advertisers, in their zeal for product exposure and branding opportunities, used this system to present essentially irrelevant ads to search engine and directory users.

Bad Banner Advertising Example

For example, an online credit card company might buy ALL of the ad inventory from Yahoo for 1 day or for X million impressions in order to present it’s latest credit card offer to the most potential customers in the least amount of time.

Although it could be argued that almost all of the searchers on Yahoo have credit cards and want to pay the lowest fee possible, it is probably NOT what they were searching for on that directory or search engine at that specific time. So the credit card banner ad was not only irrelevant, it was seen as annoying – a distraction from the true mission the searcher was on.

Additional Search Engine Advertising Techniques

A number of interesting alternatives to the basic Search Engine Advertising banner ad technique described above are available. These techniques are available for a number of reasons that I will touch on in the discussion of each technique below. Several of them are also covered in detail in the Search Engine Optimization Existing and New Site To Do List sections.

Banner Advertising Bottom Line

The bottom line is that you, the Web site owner and/or marketer, now have a number of paid alternatives to pursue that will either get you more visibility with the correct audience for your goods or services and/or will get you that exposure sooner.

Detailed instructions on how to do these submissions, particularly for Pay for Consideration and Pay for Inclusion, are detailed in the Search Engine Optimization To Do Lists for Existing and New Web Sites.

Paid Placement (CPC, PPC)

Paid Placement is, as the name implies, an advertising technique for placing your ad in the very best position possible on a search engine results page by paying for that placement.

The underlying assumption with this search engine advertising technique is that the ads appear on a search engine results page that is displaying search results AND ads that are relevant to the keyword phrase being searched. Once that level of relevance is established, the bid-for-placement portion of the formula is then implemented.

Each time a searcher clicks on the link in one of these “bid-for” search results, the searcher is taken to the advertiser’s own “landing page”, and the advertiser is charged the bid amount. This payment model is usually known as “cost-per-click” (CPC) or “pay per click” (PPC).

Two Paid Placement ad types discussed below are the most popular ones offered at the moment and, therefore, should deliver the most effective results for your site.

Google Ads Program

THE Paid Placement ad model available on the Web is offered by Google – the Google Ads Program (formerly Google AdWords).

Google Ads Example

To see all of the Google Ads options on one screen, go to Google.com and search on the word “flowers” (without the quotes). You’ll see the maximum number of ads that can be displayed on a single search results page – 3 “Sponsored Links” at the top of the page, up to 8 “Sponsored Links” along the right side of the page or sponsored ads from Google Shopping.

What Is Google Shopping?

From Wikipedia: “Google Shopping, formerly Google Product Search, Google Products and Froogle, is a Google service invented by Craig Nevill-Manning which allows users to search for products on online shopping websites and compare prices between different vendors.”

Google Ads’ most popular payment method is CPC (“cost per click”), also known as “pay per click” (PPC). In a cost per click model, the advertiser pays only if the ad is clicked on by a Google searcher, BUT the price the advertiser pays for each click is based on an ever-changing bid system. Also, these ads are being syndicated out to “Google Partners”.

The great advantage to a new site, or to an existing site that has not yet achieved a good ranking in the Google index, is that their business can get excellent visibility for their key words or phrases on Google for a very low cost.

Finally, these ads are monitored by Google for relevancy (a Google Ad ad’s “Quality Score”), their engine’s hallmark, so the ads are generally as relevant to the searcher as the results returned from Google’s search index.

Relevancy AND bid price BOTH drive final ranking/positioning of the displayed ads.

To take a test drive of the Google Ads program, go to Google.com and click on the “Advertising Programs” link on their Home Page (usually in the lower left corner).

Bing Ads

Basically this is Microsoft’s version of Google Ads. It’s very similar to Google’s ad program and it does command a sizable portion of the dollars advertisers spend on PPC programs.

Details about the Bing Ads program is available on both the Bing site as well as in Wikipedia.

Contextual Advertising

Let’s start this section with a nice, concise definition of Contextual Advertising from Wikipedia:

“Contextual advertising is a form of targeted advertising for advertisements appearing on websites or other media, such as content displayed in mobile browsers. The advertisements themselves are selected and served by automated systems based on the identity of the user and the content displayed.”

Real Life Example

So, how do contextual ads look “in real life”? Take a look at the Google ad being served along the right hand side of this page toward the top of the page. These ads are contextual ads served via the Google AdSense system. Google AdSense is an iteration of Google Ads in which Web publishers can serve relevant Google Ads to their visitors/readers.

How does this work? Again, let’s use this Web site as an example.

As the Web publisher of Digital Marketing Tutorial (DMT), I applied to Google AdSense to become part of the Google AdSense Network. A human at Google looked at the Digital Marketing Tutorial Web site, determined that it contained interesting, original content, and approved my application.

Google then crawled the Digital Marketing Tutorial Web site again just as it normally does, but this time it added the relevant keyword phrases it determined for each DMT Web page to the Google AdSense index.

Google Ads

Compensation to the Publishers comes from Google splitting the commission they receive from the Advertisers whenever the ad is clicked on by a visitor/reader on the Publisher’s Web site.

The advantage to Advertisers in using systems like Google AdSense is that they get a broader, yet still relevant, reach for their ads. The advantage for Publishers, especially small/medium size publishers, is that they now have a new source of revenue, while still presenting relevant content to their readers.

The advantage to Search Engines like Google is that they have increased the overall ad impressions being served and, if their relevancy algorithms are working, the number of (paid-for) click-thru’s the ads receive, so the overall revenue Google is able to generate from the original Google Ads increases.

To learn more about the Google AdSense ad program, go to Google.com and click on the “Advertising” link on their Home Page.

Search Engine Marketing – Return to SEM Start Page

Note: My name is Dave Ingalls. If you need help with your SEO and/or Digital Marketing tasks, please review the B2B SEO Services and B2B Digital Marketing Services I offer.