What is Paid Search?

Updated on: August 12, 2024

What is Paid Search?

Paid search is a digital marketing tactic where advertisers pay search engines like Google for placing ads on search engine results pages (SERPs). Paid Search ads enables you (advertisers) to display your website or landing page listing at the top of search results.

This will drive more traffic to your website. Search engines like google use the pay per click advertising model. You only pay when your target audience clicks on your ad and views your web page or landing page. This blog explains ‘What is paid search?’.

1. What is the importance of paid search?

2. How does paid search work?

3. How to implement paid search?

4. How to evaluate your paid search ads?

5. Case Study on how to drive revenue growth from google ads?

1. What is the importance of paid search?

It is estimated that Google handles approximately 8.5 billion searches per day.

Paid search is a source of traffic acquisition for your business. Other traffic acquisition sources include organic search and social media marketing.

Paid search can help your business acquire quality leads and sales. Paid search helps drive revenue for your business. The goal of paid search or pay per click (PPC) professionals is to bring quality web traffic to your website. Web traffic that is aligned to your buyer persona will have a higher conversion rate.

With keyword research, your business can target buyers that are most likely in the market for offerings similar to yours.

Unlike SEO, your business can see immediate results with paid search ad campaigns. Your paid search ads target buyers with high intent.

SEO and paid search are digital marketing tactics that your business needs to consider in their digital marketing strategy. Understanding the differences between SEO and paid search will help you decide when to use them.

Search engines operate using a bidding approach, where they bid for keywords. The price for keywords are dictated by the market. People are 4 times likely to click on a paid search ad on google than on other search engines. Business typically make an average of $2 revenue for every dollar spent on google paid search ads.

2. How does paid search work?

When deciding what search terms you would like to target, consider if the keywords that you choose are relevant to your target audience and are highly searched in google. Then decide how much are you willing to spent on your chosen keywords. The lower the search volume, the cheaper it would be to win a bid.

Google also uses a measure known as quality score. This measures the quality of your ad and the relevance of keywords that you are targeting. The quality score is calculated based on three factors:

Expected click through rate - The likelihood that your ad will be clicked when shown.
Ad relevance - How closely the ad matches the intent behind a user’s search?
Your landing page user experience - How relevant and useful your landing page is to users who click your ad?

Google assigns a score on a scale of 1 to 10. This score influences the cost of your keywords and the effectiveness of your paid search campaign.

3. How to implement paid search?

Setup an account in google ads. You run campaigns with specific objectives from within your google ads account. Each campaign may have multiple ad groups with different themes.

Each ad group may have multiple keywords. Create specific ads for the keywords that you are targeting. Ads are what your target audience will see if the auction is won.

Set your daily advertising budget. You may occasionally exceed your daily advertising budget, but your google ads campaign will not go beyond your monthly budget.

4. How to evaluate your paid search ads?

You can evaluate the performance of your paid search campaigns by

How many people saw your ads?
How many people clicked to visit your website or landing page?
How many leads are your web pages or landing pages generating from your ads?
How much sales are your web pages or landing pages generating from your ads?

Conclusion

Paid search is important for your web content to be found in search results. It enables website owners to generate high quality traffic by targeting buyers that are most likely in the market for offerings similar to yours.

Google’s quality score influences the cost of your keywords and the effectiveness of your paid search campaign. The goal of paid search or pay per click (PPC) professionals is to bring in qualified web traffic. Qualified web traffic will have higher conversion rates.

This will lead to an increase in qualified leads or sales for your business. Paid search campaign performance can be evaluated by using metrics like impressions, leads or sales. Paid search is a digital marketing tactic that helps drive revenue growth for your business.

Watch an example to learn how to drive revenue growth from Google Ads for your B2B company?

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Written by Anees Misbahudeen

Founder & Digital Marketing Director, INNMCO

Anees Misbahudeen - Company Profile (700 × 436 px)

I help businesses grow web traffic, leads & sales. I am a digital marketing director specialising in SEO, Google Ads, email marketing & content marketing campaigns. I've supported the growth story of 30+ brands in software, financial services, automotive, manufacturing & B2B. I’ve 10+ years of digital marketing industry experience, as a founder, digital marketing strategist & consultant.

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What is Paid Search?