What is Paid Search? Understanding Paid vs Organic Results
Paid search ads are the links you get at the top of any search engine results. If you search for “SEM paid search” you’ll see ads from companies offering to help you with paid search ad campaigns before you get to links that the search engine thinks are most relevant to your search.
The links that a search engine thinks are most helpful for your search are known as organic results. People spend a lot of time and money to be first on Google for organic results. There’s a simple reason for this. Once someone has found what they’re looking for, they stop looking.
Paid search ads let you bypass the grind and hassle of getting to the top search results organically. Instead, you pay a small fee to appear at the top of searches that are relevant to your business. You can choose what kind of customer and search types to target. As a result, any money you put out will be limited to people that are actually interested in what you’re selling. This gets you on top of search results without worrying about your organic placement.
How Paid Search Works
Paid search ads appear based on an auction system. That means you have control over how much you’re willing to spend for a potential lead. Search engines use an ad ranking system to determine what ads to show. The basic formula search engines use is:
Ad Rank = Bid x Quality score.
Your bid is determined by the settings you select. Your quality score is determined by your expected click through rate, your ad’s relevance to the user’s search, and how relevant your landing page is to the user’s search. That means you can use your bid and landing page content to narrow down who sees your ad until you target the users most likely to convert.
Why Do Search Engine Marketing like Paid Search?
There are several benefits to SEM techniques like paid search to get more clients. We’ll cover some of the specific benefits in a bit more detail in a moment. However, the biggest benefit of paid search ads is that you get the control and feedback you need to ensure every campaign goes better than the last one.
Benefits of SEM
This section covers the basic benefits of search engine marketing. Use this information to help you determine if paid search is right for you.
Targeted Ads
The first benefit of paid search is that you can target your ads. Targeted ads perform better because the people seeing them are actually interested in what you’re offering. As a result, you can qualify your audience and focus on showing your paid search ads to the users that are most likely to turn into conversions.
Cost-Efficient Results
Paid search is also incredibly cost efficient. You can control and measure every cent of your budget to ensure you get the maximum ROI. Consider paid search compared to a general marketing strategy, like a billboard. Spending $2,000 on a billboard may or may not get you any customers. Moreover, you don’t have any way to track which customers it brought in.
On the other hand, paid search shows you exactly what kind of customers clicked on your ads. Additionally, you only spend money on qualified leads. That means you’ve got a much better chance at landing a new customer. There’s a reason that businesses make $2 for every $1 they spend in Google Ads.
Effective
It takes a lot of work to move to the top of organic search results. That’s money and time that might be better spent elsewhere. Paid search ads move you to the top of the search engine results. That means you get to be seen first, without devoting the time and energy to the mystery that is a search ranking page.
Terms to Know to Get the Most out of Paid Search
Like everything involving the internet, there are some terms you’ll see when you’re looking into paid search. We’ve got a glossary of some of the most common terms here to help you understand what it is you’re looking at.
- Ad Position – Determines where in the search results your ad appears.
- Click – someone clicking on your ad
- Click Through Rate – the number of times someone clicks on your ad compared to how many times it appears, expressed as a percentage.
- Cost Per Click – the amount for each click you pay the search engine
- Conversion- a customer completing a certain action, like buying something or signing up for a newsletter.
- Cost Per Lead (CPL) – The amount you pay for each lead generated
- Cost Per Mile (CPM) – The amount you pay per 1,000 impressions.
- Impressions – The number of times your ad appeared on a page where someone could see it.
- Landing Page – The website where your ad takes the user after they click.
- Keyword – a word or phrase that triggers your bid for an ad.
- Quality Score – A ranking system that Google uses to decide your ad rank. It ranges from 1 to 10.
- Search Engine Results Page (SERP) – the results someone sees when they search a keyword.
