This is the second installment in a series on paid search.
So now that you have a rough idea on what paid search is (pay-per-click), how does paid search work? In essence paid search is pay-per-click bidding on the search paid against a specific keyword or keyword phrase. However one must understand these elements and how they individually work to get your campaign going in Adwords on any other ppc format. The three main elements that make up how your search works are Keywords, the Ad shown and the Landing page (and it’s quality score).
Let’s look at these somewhat stepwise:
We go into Adwords to write our first campaign, how does it work? Once you go into Adwords and create an account, you will be led to creating your first campaign. So that:
1. You write your campaign name, and ad group (your actual ad)
2. Create your keyword (s) and your default bid and daily budget
Once you’ve done this, you have actually set up and have a campaign running, believe it or not. Let’s look a little deeper to see how these elements work.
Here’s one of my Ads, nothing too fancy:
- Internet Marketing
Help - Simple Marketing Strategies to
- Help Small Business Grow
Profitably - www.PaulAmes.com
You’ll see it’s composed of a simple headline, two text lines and a url address to click to if you the “clicker”. How this gets shown on a Google page is where the keywords come it. In my case one of my keyword phrases is “marketing help for small business”. When that phrase shows up in Google, my ad will show up somewhere on the page, depending on what I’ve bid for that phrase. So this is how bidding occurs. The more I pay for a phrase, say $2.50 for a potential click, the higher on the page I will show up with the other bidders for this same phrase. (Yes, bidding is quite expensive and this is why Google is loaded with cash!) But there are two other things that affect where on the page I will show up, the relationship of the Ad to the text and material on the Landing page.
This relationship is what is called the “Quality Score”. Google actually runs an algorithm that examines the quality of the landing page as it relates to the Ad and the keyword phrase that brings it up. If you have a higher quality score landing page as it relates to the keyword you are using, you might actually pay less per click than a competitor with a weaker quality score page, for the same keyword. Quality scores are ranked 1-10 by Google, so it pays to have a landing page that is tightly woven to the keyword phrase you are using. Next week, we’ll talk about keyword phrases and keyword match types and how they work.
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