What is Search Engine Advertising?
Search-engine advertising (SEA) is a branch of online marketing. Advertisements in the form of a text or images are posted on search engines such as Google or Bing. These ads then appear prominently in the Search Engine Results Page or SERP. This method belongs to the main source of income for search engine providers. Search engine advertising is a cost-effective way to improve businesses and brands, as appearing high up in the SERPs makes brands and products more visible.
Google Ads
Google Ads is a product of Alphabet Inc. that offers marketers a wide range of advertisement opportunities in the SEA field. The principle of placing ads through Ads is based on auctioning. Advertisers bid on a specific keyword or they pay for clicks and impressions on display advertisements. This is known as PPC or CPC advertising. Factors, such as the quality of the landing page, quality of the ad text, as well as relevance of the keywords and positive history of the AdWords account, play a crucial role in the final placement of text ads or banners. Banners or text ads posted through Google Ads are always regarded as advertising. The following forms of advertising are possible using Google Ads:
- Classic text ads: An advertiser selects a keyword or keywords with which their text ads will be displayed on a prominent position in the SERP. This entails creating the so-called campaigns that, in turn, consist of ad groups. Every ad group is categorized into advertisements based on the selected keywords. If a user searches for one of these keywords, the corresponding AdWords advertisement is displayed.
- Product listing ads: With the so-called Shopping Ads (former Product Listing Ads), Google Ads offers the possibility to place product ads that are directly created from a product file generated by the customer. The modulation is done by specifying the structured data in the data feed.
- Display ads: These are ads in the form of images or text that are placed on platforms belonging to the Google advertisement network. Registration for this network can be done through the Google AdSense platform.
Google Ads offers the possibility to combine different forms of advertisement of SEA. Simultaneous placement of PLA, text ads, and display ads is, therefore, possible. Google Ads is the most commonly used tool for SEA in the world.