There are a plethora of factors that are used in online advertising. You’ve got a huge set of advertising formats to select from, and there are unlimited ways in which you can get in touch with your target audience. Search advertisements and display advertisements are the two biggest competitors when it comes to online advertising. Both beginners and seasoned campaigners often get confused about whether to employ search ads, display ads, or both.
There are various aspects that should be taken into consideration while deciding which sort of campaign is ideal for you. This is a critical decision to make because choosing the wrong advertising format could waste a significant portion of your marketing budget.
So, what is the difference between search ads and display ads and which advertising format is best suited for you? Can you employ both of them to make the largest proportion of your marketing efforts? Since both search and display ads play a big part in the advertising drive, it is best to know when and how to employ each of them.
In this article, we will answer each of the above questions and will also talk about every single thing that you should know about search and display ads before using them for marketing purposes.
What do you mean by Search ads?
Search advertising is quite a simple procedure, and it has three main constituents—a headline, a display URL, and a description text. All these constituents are designed in a way to go through them. The ad extensions can also be incorporated to offer users some additional information. The ranking and the revenue generated from a search ad depend on two factors—the bidding strategy and quality score.
Search advertising is one of the most desired formats of pay-per-click advertising. In the pay-per-click advertising model, brands follow an auction-based representation and pay their money to have their brands displayed in the search engine results when users seek out some specific keywords.
For example, let’s say you’re the owner of a clothing company that manufactures customized “aphorisms” or “sayings” on clothes. You were smart enough and made clothes that had “couple” sayings on them during the last Valentine’s week. You want them to advertise on Google for the upcoming Valentine’s week in the month of February.
When someone desires to buy a “couple” shirt from an online store and types the keyword “couple clothing” on Google, The search result of that visitor will activate your advertisement to appear in the sponsored segment of the search results. If you have sneakily fashioned your ad with premium images and convincing ad text, the visitor will definitely be attracted and will click on your ad to visit your website. Hopefully, the searcher will take some further action as well.
How do you define Display ads?
A Google display marketing initiates within the interface of Google Ads. The performance of Display ads are very different from search ads. The principal difference between a search and a display ad is that search ads have the outward appearance of “pull” advertising, whereas display ads follow the pattern of “push” advertising. The search ad appears on your screen if you have already searched for that particular product or service, while display ads are paid posts whose appearance depends on various targeting factors.
Display ads allow you to showcase your content in front of the audience without waiting for them to locate you. It further allows you to become livelier in the sales funnel, introducing new viewers to your service even if they have never heard of you!
Display ads are not only used for websites but can also be employed in the following formats:
- A Text Format is a single headline, a two-line text, or an URL that appears in the sidebars of a website.
- It includes images, gifs, animations, and other customised layouts.
- Gmail Format: It appears in the personal chatbox.
- It targets particular mobile application categories for branding.
Google also provides a variety of options to target your audience.
How do Search ads work?
While display ads can appear all over the internet, search ads can only show up in the search engine results. Advertisers (or marketeers) create an inventory of keywords that are pertinent to their services or products, and then they can tender to have their ad displayed on the screen when someone searches for those specific keywords or phrases.
Multiple businesses can have the same keyword and that is the reason why every search engine advertising platform goes through the bidding process. The bidding process is conducted so that the owner of the site can make a decision on which ads should appear on the landing pages.
The higher you bid for your search keywords, the greater the chances that your advertisements will appear in the search engine whenever someone searches for that particular keyword. Conversely, with advanced platforms like Google Ads, you don’t need to pay every time your ad appears on the page. Instead, they employ the pay-per-click model, wherein you have to pay whenever someone truly clicks on the ad.
To get all these benefits, you need to select the right keywords, and the bidding necessitates a sturdy understanding of your viewers and the selected platform. Besides pay-per-click ads, you can also opt for search engine optimization or SEO, which will help you raise traffic with search engines.
Search ads also allow you to optimize the overall performance of the website to achieve a higher rank in the organic search engine results. This will automatically attract more traffic even without spending extra money on advertising.
Display ads: How do they work?
Display advertisements are the banners or texts or emails or applications that you get to see on websites selling space to the marketer. These ads are utilized to generate a direct relationship between the website and the marketer (or advertiser). Since the number of businesses and online platforms is increasing rapidly, selecting the correct advertiser to work with is becoming more challenging.
There are a couple of platforms, such as the Google Display Network, that bundle the sites, divide them categorically, and provide them to the advertisers as a whole package. These Advertisers submit bids to ad networking services and the services select the highest bidder.
In addition to targeting specific websites, some marketers use remarketing to reach out to users who have previously visited their websites.
Flexibility is another key reason why you should opt for a display ad. You can implement your own ideas while making an ad, and you can also produce them in a variety of different sizes and with distinct images. This feature enables you to be more creative than an ordinary text ad. The inventive thought process can facilitate the conversion of your business.
On the contrary, display ads are easy to disregard. A visitor to your website may easily disregard and scroll down the advertisement.
How to set up Search advertising campaigns?
Follow the below steps’ instructions carefully to set up a search advertising campaign.
- Make a Google Ads account.
- Sign in to your Google Ads account.
- Go to the page menu on the left of your screen and click on Campaigns.
- Select the plus button (+), then click on New Campaign.
- Select the goals of your campaign.
- Select the type of your campaign as “Search”.
- Select the result type that you desire to obtain from the campaign.
- Click to continue
- Give an appropriate name to your campaign, enter your target location and preferable language, and select your estimated budget.
- Click on “Automated Bid Strategy” under the “Bidding” section to optimise the bids.
- Enter the bidding limit.
- Go to General Settings, expand it, and then click on “Dynamic Search Ad” to create a Dynamic Ad Group.
- Enter the domain of the website and also select the language of the website.
- Click on Save.
What are the steps for setting up display advertising campaigns?
Follow the below steps’ instructions carefully to set up a display advertising campaign.
- Make a Google Ads account.
- Sign in to your Google Ads account.
- Go to the navigation panel on the left of your screen and click on Display Campaigns.
- Go to the page menu on the left of your screen and select Ads & Extensions.
- Select the plus button (+), then click on Responsive Display Ad.
- Select the type of your ad group.
- Insert and save your images.
- Fill in all the ad information.
- Select the size and format of your potential ad.
- Preview the selected ad.
- Go to the review page and review your whole campaign.
- Check for potential issues under the “notification” section and click on “Fix it” if you want to fix any issues.
- Click on Save.
What is the purpose of using of Search ads?
Below are the six purposes for which you should employ search ads for your business.
1. To enhance the organic traffic
There are many businesses that can’t afford to squander their valuable time solely depending on search engine optimization to succeed. The organic traffic results of a website highlight the relative content, and search ads are very much capable of delivering it quickly. This makes search ads a great strategy to build up organic traffic.
2. To generate high-quality leads
The search advertising campaign allows you to employ different keywords to trigger and activate your ad. Besides, it also allows you to employ negative keywords so that your ad doesn’t get triggered when some users search for certain keywords that are not relevant to your business or products. By doing this, you can create your ads to accurately match the search intent of the user.
3. It helps to serve your local audience.
Search ads are a pretty good option to get in touch with your nearby audience. They are better than display ads in terms of reaching out to a small, specific target audience.
4. If you have a small sales cycle,
Search ads are also useful if your business requires a short sales cycle, and by doing this, you won’t require remarketing for those people with whom you’ve already engaged with your brand.
5. Endorsement of emergency products
If your business provides critical and emergency services (such as plumbers, locksmiths, tow trucks, fire and rescue, ambulance, emergency veterinarians, electricians, etc.), then it is always better for you to use search ads. These are the services where people don’t want to pay much time to see your display ad.
Instead, they are more likely to search for services whenever they require any of these emergency services.
Note: In these particular cases, use call extensions for your ads.
Campaigns with a lower budget
Search ads may be the go-to way for you if you’re a beginner or want to create a lower-budget campaign because of the following factors:
- Using a pay-per-click advertising model, you can tip either through pay per click or through pay per 1,000 impressions.
- If you bid on highly significant keywords, then you’ll be able to reach out to more audiences, get more conversions, and have a better ROI.
What is the purpose of using Display ads?
Below are the four purposes for which you should employ display ads for your business.
1. If your business or product is more visual,
One of the biggest advantages of display ads over search ads is that display ads allow you to include images and videos. This is a huge benefit for consumer services that heavily depend on visual imagery, such as clothing and apparel, home décor, adventure, entertainment, etc.
They also work very well along with various digital aspects like video, ebooks, infographics, etc. Google has made it extremely easy for advertisers to create video campaigns. This can be a powerful tool to engage your viewers since most people are more likely to get attached to video or image content than simple text ads.
2. Raising business awareness
It is always not necessary that the viewer visiting your website will purchase your product or rent your services. They might still be in the searching or awareness stage of the advertising funnel, doing their research before making an investment.
Here, display networks can come in handy to enhance the valuation of your business or service. Using Google’s targeting services, you can quickly build brand awareness before launching high-intent search engine advertising.
3. If your sales cycle is longer,
As much as search ads are valuable for shorter sales cycles, display ads are best suited for longer sales cycles. You can opt for a display ad if your business or products aren’t classically purchased instantaneously and thus have a longer sales cycle. If your services include greater expenses like automobiles, higher education, enterprise software, building machines, etc., then display ads are the go-to option.
In these circumstances, you have to make sure that your brand stays on top of the minds of every viewer as they consider making a purchase from your site.
This sort of advertising is done through cross-channel marketing, omnichannel marketing, or retargeting.
4. To get in touch with the niche markets
Display ads are often successful as they are applied on websites where a viewer spends a lot of their time. Google compares the searched keyword with your listed keywords and then advertises them to the significant web pages across all the available websites, which means you effortlessly accommodate a niche audience along with interest-targeted ads and/or contextual ads.
What is better – Display ads or search ads?
The answer to this question clearly depends on you and your campaigning process. As we’ve already mentioned, both search and display ads have their advantages, and both can be exceptionally helpful in different circumstances. However, you must appreciate the difference and know when to utilize each of them. Go through each of these factors before you make the final call.
When you’re done with selecting the format and creating the ad, connect it to an appropriate post-click landing page for the optimal outcome. All sorts of conversations take place on the Post-click landing page. So it is very significant to create a dedicated post-click landing page.
There is another way to enhance the marketing of your website by utilizing both search and display advertising. If you have the budget, you can run both search and display campaigns, and those will also help you achieve optimal results. Furthermore, it is recommended to run separate movements, one for the search network and the other for the display network. Combining both would result in a complicated process, and optimizing the metrics would take a long time. When you run each ad separately, you can compare the metrics. It will also help you to make better decisions in the future.
My name is Vijay Singh Khatri, and I enjoy meeting new people and finding ways to help them have an uplifting experience. I have had a variety of customer service opportunities, through which I was able to have fewer returned products and increased repeat customers when compared with co-workers.
