Why Search Advertising Works

September 27th, 2007 | Posted by Ben Keogh

It is no accident that Search engine advertising is now the worldâ€™s fastest-growing ad market. It works! It generates new business, and it increases brand awareness. For people serious about increasing website traffic, online advertising is a natural choice, it specifically targets to your potential customers that helps them find your business and website.

What is Search Engine Advertising?

Do you sometimes think and ask, â€œIs there any other easier way to top the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)?â€ Sometimes it is difficult to achieve a top position for certain keywords, but there is an easier way to do it, and it is not free. If you do not want to hire a Search Engine Optimiser (SEO), you can have the option to choose the search advertising method.

Search Engine Advertising is known by different names. It is also called Sponsored Search. Advertising with search engines is part of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) method to increase the visibility of a website in SERPs. This advertising campaign can be a great help to your siteâ€™s success and will bring you lots of benefits, but only with close supervision and proper management. It is relatively simple. You will just select a keyword and decide how much you are willing to pay for each visitor that visits your site through the search results. The more money you can give in, the higher you will rank on the result list. Your site must be relevant to the keyword you want to bid on.

Why with the Search Engines?

Why advertise with the search engines? Here are the 2 major reasons we can say that Search engines ads are effectively working:

The only reason people visit a search engine is to leave it and find another site. Thus, if you advertise the thing users are looking for, they are quite likely to check out your offer.
Because search engines know what users are looking for (based on what the user typed on the search bar). Displaying an ad for something that the user immediately wants is much more powerful than targeting ads based on general user profiling.

What is PPC?

The most common ads offered on search engines is the PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising model. It is exactly what it sounds like. PPC is an effective tool of getting huge traffic, which is also the most expensive type of advertising. The advertiser bids on keywords and tells the advertising company that they will pay N number of cents or dollars for every click that they receive to their website through the PPC-providerâ€™s website. The more you are willing to pay per click, the higher your site will appear in the results for the keywords you choose.

Why does it work so well?

Search ads like PPC listings work well because they put your business in front of people looking for your products and services. Here are the grounds why search advertising works so well:

The power of search keywords

Search-driven advertising is delivered by means of a trigger: keywords. It declares motivation and describes interest. Just as important, a keyword is the beginning of a conversation between you and your prospective customer. How does this work? Let us say someone is doing a search for “used vans” or “ipods”. If an advertiser offering one of those things or something related to them that has chosen those keywords, their ad appears along with websites that correspond to the userâ€™s search.

A responsive audience

The audience thus sees the ad as a response to a question, which the ad, they quickly realize, provides an answer. At this point, they become interested and even enthusiastic. Their responsiveness derives, from the relevance of the ad to their query, which keyword targeting makes possible.

A trusted source

With your ads being with the top major search engines like Googleâ€™s AdWords and Overture by Yahoo, you will more likely to be trusted by your targeted audience and there is no doubt about it anyway.

User-friendly format

Text-format is more effective than any other because of being clear and straight forward. One good example is ads on Google, they are better since they are formatted as text-only. There is a big chance that users will actually see them, rather than ignore them due to banner blindness. Also, because the text is short, it is focus on crisp and plain content that might actually communicate something in the second or two users typically allocate to reading ads.

Bringing people together

The simple fact is that advertising works best when the customer find what they are looking for efficiently, and know what it means once they have found it. Bringing people, information, and ideas together is precisely what search ads do. Search engines present relevant information to search users who ask for it.

Search Ad Providers

There are a number of UK advertising providers offering opportunities to advertise within the main search engine results and other relevant content websites.

Google Adwords

http://adwords.google.co.uk
Setup fee: Â£5
Min. cost-per-click: 1p or more - based on keyword
Min. monthly spend: None
Coverage: Google, AOL, Ask Jeeves, smaller content websites
Content targeting: Yes
Advert copy: 25 character title, 70 character description
Conversion tracking: Yes

Google AdWords has by far the widest coverage of any of the providers, allowing advertisers to reach a wide market using just one system. This coverage also makes it the most suitable for specialised businesses, who would not receive much search traffic from the smaller PPC providers. The minimum cost per click for a keyword can be a little as 1p, which can make AdWords suitable for editorial or low order value websites, where the 10p minimum cost per click required by the other providers would not be so cost-effective.

MSN adCenter

URL: http://advertising.msn.com/microsoft-adcenter
Setup fee: Â£5
Min. cost-per-click: 5p
Min monthly spend: None
Coverage: MSN Search
Content targeting: No
Advert copy: 25 character title, 70 character description
Conversion tracking: Yes

The format of Microsoftâ€™s PPC service provides an added level of campaign targeting and management. By using the data from MSNâ€™s numerous registered users who have signed up to Hotmail, Passport and Messenger services, Microsoft adCenter will use this data, when available, to provide demographic data to their PPC search market management and response data. Advertisers can place higher bids to boost their listings if searchers match their selected market profiles and although this data would not always be available, it could prove useful.

The other main advantage offered by the Microsoft adCenter is the ability for â€œday partingâ€, whereby you can stipulate at what time of day your adverts appear, or on which days of the week if these can affect the responsiveness of your campaign. This can potentially give the advertiser much more control over spending and a greater ability to test the responsiveness of their advertising programme.

Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture)

URL: http://searchmarketing.yahoo.co.uk
Min. deposit: Â£60
Min. cost-per-click: 10p
Min monthly spend: Â£20
Coverage: Yahoo, MSN, Wanadoo, AltaVista, smaller content websites
Content targeting: Yes
Advert copy: 40 character title, 190 character description
Conversion tracking: Yes

Yahoo! Search Marketing provides coverage within the search results of Yahoo! and MSN. Larger text adverts are allowed than on Google AdWords, enabling a user to consider your offering in more depth before clicking on your advert, which we have found can result in a higher conversion rate.

Miva

URL: www.miva.co.uk
Setup fee: Â£10 plus Â£50 initial deposit
Min. cost-per-click: 10p
Min monthly spend: None
Coverage: Mostly consumer based content sites including Lastminute.com,
The Sun, Autoexpress, Eurosport, Maxim, The Mirror
Content targeting: No
Advert copy: Logo, 50 character title, 200 character description
Conversion tracking: No

MIVA provides a wide range of tools to help businesses grow; including performance based marketing products to help businesses find new customers and monetisation tools to help online publishers generate advertising revenue from their websites.

Mirago

URL: http://www.mirago.co.uk
Setup fee: Â£25
Min. cost-per-click: 10p
Min monthly spend: None
Coverage: Dogpile, Infospace, South Online, Wahooma, Thelocalweb
Content targeting: No
Advert copy: 60 character title, 180 character description
Conversion tracking: No

The system used by Mirago provides advertisers with a good level of flexibility, plus there is no minimum monthly spend requirement, so it can provide a good source of extra traffic which can be efficiently managed.

Webfinder

URL: www.webfinder.com
Setup fee: Â£49 plus Â£50 initial deposit
Min. cost-per-click: 10p
Min monthly spend: None
Coverage: Thomsonlocal.com, Business search results on Wanadoo,
Ask Jeeves and Yahoo!
Content targeting: No
Advert copy: 60 character title, 140 character description
Conversion tracking: No

Local search marketing may also be a future strength of WebFinder as the leader in offline local advertising.

Other Providers of PPC Advertising

Benefits of Search Engine Advertising

Search ads have a number of advantages to businesses of all sizes. A lot agreed that it is growing at such an extraordinary rate not just because of guarantees and the popularity of search; it is because of the following benefits:

Small initial investment.

The search engines do not charge a fee to place or run your ad. You only pay for the users that click on the ad.

Budget size is up to you.

Depending on how much you want to invest and what kind of sales or leads you want to generate, you can set your budget as large or small as you like. Advertisers can do a much better job at targeting effectiveness than in traditional advertising mediums.

Search engine advertising allows you to be visible almost instantaneously.

It allows you to market to people who are seeking you; taking actions and looking for your product and services. And when a query is launched, there are only two possible outcomes: they will find you, or they will find your competitor.

Search engine advertising is like a reverse broadcast system

Instead of broadcasting to people on what they should want, search engine advertising works for the audience in telling you what they want, first.

Immediate results.

Research, set up and implementation of PPC campaigns can happen in just a few days time, as opposed to natural rankings which can take weeks or months to gain a ranking. With PPC, you can start seeing results and generating sales the day your ad goes up.

Brand your name.

Sometimes you just want to get your name out there. What better way to do that then a top placement on Google or Yahoo?
Attract qualified visitors to more flexibility when managing campaigns and greater accountability when measuring the results.