Google's advertising networks
With AdWords, your ads can show on one or both of Google's advertising networks: the Google Search Network and the Google Display Network. The campaign type you choose determines which of these networks your ads will appear on.
Search Network
The Search Network includes Google Search, other Google sites such as Maps and Shopping, and hundreds of non-Google search partner websites that show AdWords ads matched to search results.
The Search Network can help advertisers do the following:
Show their text ads next to Google search results
Reach customers actively searching for their specific product or service
Display Network
The Display Network includes a collection of Google websites (like Google Finance, Gmail, Blogger, and YouTube), partner sites, and mobile sites and apps that show AdWords ads matched to the content on a given page.
The Display Network can help advertisers do the following:
Use appealing ad formats to reach a wide range of customers with broad interests
Build brand awareness and customer loyalty
Increase engagement with customers
Choose more specifically where their ads can appear, and to what type of audience
To understand how AdWords works, you'll want to familiarize yourself with some of the key building blocks: where your ads can appear, the quality of your ads, and what you pay for them. You'll learn about each of these in this module and the ones that follow.
As you learned in a previous module, your ads can appear in different places across the web, depending on how you target your ads, to whom you choose to show them, and the types of ads you create.
Showing your ads alongside search results
To understand how your ads are shown on the Search Network, let's take a closer look at keywords .
You'll use keywords — words or phrases that describe your product or service — to target your ads. When someone searches for terms that are similar to your keywords, your ads can appear alongside or above search results on sites that are part of the Search Network. Your ad could be eligible to appear based on the similarity of your keywords to their search terms as well as your keyword match types, which we'll explain in more detail later.
Keywords also help determine how much you pay. Each of your keywords has a maximum cost-per-click bid amount (or "max. CPC"), which specifies the maximum amount you're willing to pay each time someone clicks your ad.
Search ad formats
It's also important to think about the different types of ads that can appear on Search Network sites:
Text ads: The simplest and most common kind of search ad, text ads are made up of headline text, a description, and a display URL. You can also use ad extensions with text ads. They prominently display information about your business, such as a phone number, location, or links to other pieces of relevant content from deeper within your sitemap. Learn more
Showing your ads on websites across the Internet
You can also choose to show your ads to people as they browse the web. Your ads can appear on specific websites or placements that you choose, or on websites based on the targeting methods that you choose, such as keywords, placement, audiences, and topics.
Keywords can trigger your ad to show on placements, which are sites across the Internet where your ads can appear. Google automatically determines where your ads appear by matching your keywords to these placements, or you can pick specific placements yourself for greater control over where your ads appear.
In addition to keywords, you can use different Display Network targeting options to show your ads to specific groups of people based on their interests, age or gender, or whether they've previously visited your website. We'll go over these options in more detail later.
Display ad formats
Now that you know more about how your ads can appear on the Display Network, let's look at the different ad formats that you can use. In addition to the text ads that you'll see on Google search, sites on the Display Network show other types of visually engaging ads, too.
Here's a list of ad formats you can use on the Display Network:
Text ads
Image ads
Rich media ads
Video ads
Example
Antoine, an account planner at Acme, has started building a marketing plan for Fiona's new furniture line to help her reach customers on the Google Display Network. Here's how:
Add keywords about children's furniture, such as "bunk bed," and Fiona's ads might be automatically matched to a blog about home decor.
Identify blogs that cater to parents and children's decor that Fiona wants her ads to show on, and add these sites as placements.
Showing your ads on mobile phones
Reach potential customers as they search or visit websites on the go — researching or completing purchases on their mobile phones, for example. Here are the different places your ads can appear:
Text ads can appear when people search on Google and other Search Network from their mobile devices.
Text, image, and video ads can appear on Display Network websites when people visit these sites from high-end mobile device (such as iPhones, Android devices).
Showing your ads to specific audiences
You can also show your ads to people in selected locations, who speak a certain language, or to specific groups of people.
If you have text ads, you can choose to show them to customers in an entire country, a certain geographic location, and even to customers who use names of locations in their searches. You can also target your campaigns to the languages that your potential customers speak.
Scenario
As you read through this section, think about how you'd approach the following:
Fiona wants the landing page for all of her ads to go to the homepage of Fine Furniture's website. The homepage, however, isn't very customer-friendly — it's not clear how to navigate the site, there are too many images, and some of the sales announcements are outdated. Additionally, the homepage isn't relevant to all of the ads Antoine is planning to have the agency's creative director design.
What might you tell Fiona about the importance of the landing page experience?
Understanding Quality Score and Ad Rank
Higher quality ads can lead to lower prices and better ad positions.
To give you a better understanding of how ad quality works on AdWords, we'll go over Quality Score and Ad Rank. The Quality Score reported in your account is an estimate of the quality of your ads and landing pages triggered by that keyword in auctions throughout the day. Ad Rank determines the order in which your ad shows up on the page (also known as ad position).
The components of Quality Score are expected clickthrough rate (CTR), ad relevance, and landing page experience. Each keyword gets a Quality Score on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 is the lowest score and 10 is the highest.
Why does your ad quality matter? The more relevant your ads and landing pages are to the user, the more likely it is that you'll have a higher Quality Score and benefit from having higher quality components of your Ad Rank, such as a higher ad position or lower cost-per-click (CPC).
Keep in mind that Quality Score is intended to give you a general sense of the quality of your ads, but doesn't take into account any auction-time factors, such as someone's actual search terms, type of device, language preference, location, or the time of day.
Ad Rank, however, does take into account auction-time factors and determines where your ad appears on the page or whether it appears at all. Every time one of your ads competes in the auction, AdWords calculates your Ad Rank using your bid amount, the components of Quality Score (expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience), and the expected impact of extensions and other ad formats.
Does this mean that a higher bid can always lead to a higher ad position? No. Even if your competition has higher bids than yours, you can still win a higher ad position at a lower price by using highly relevant keywords and ads.
AdWords gives you control over your advertising costs and there's no minimum amount that you have to spend. Instead, you set a daily budget and choose how you'll spend your money.
Choosing a bidding strategy
Choosing how you'll spend your money means choosing how you'd like to bid. Try choosing a bidding strategy based on your goals, such as whether you want to focus on getting clicks, impressions, or conversions.
We'll go over your bidding options in more detail later, but here's an overview of the strategies:
Cost-per-click (CPC): If you want to focus on clicks on your ads and drive traffic to your website, you'll want to use CPC bidding.
Cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM): If you want to focus on impressions — the number of times your ad shows — and increase awareness of your brand, you'll want to use CPM bidding. Note that CPM bidding is available for Display Network campaigns only.
Cost-per-acquisition (CPA): If you want to focus on conversions — which is when people take a specific action on your website after clicking one of your ads — you'll want to use CPA bidding.
Setting a daily budget
Your daily budget is the amount you're willing to spend each day, on average, for each ad campaign in your account. The amount is entirely up to you, and you can edit it whenever you like.
When you set your bids, you set the maximum amount you're willing to pay for either 1 click on your ad, 1,000 ad impressions, or 1 conversion. Your actual costs will likely vary from auction to auction. But even though your actual costs may vary, your daily budget puts a limit on how much you can accrue in costs over the average number of days in a month (30.4).
For more guidance on setting the right budgets and bids, check out this video:
How much you're charged
The final amount you're charged depends on what type of bidding strategy you choose.
If you're using CPC or CPM bidding, the actual amount you'll be charged is no more than what's needed for your ad to appear higher than the advertiser immediately below you.
If you're using CPA bidding, the actual amount you'll be charged might exceed your specific bid because the actual amount depends on factors outside of Google's control, such as changes to your website or ads, or increased competition in ad auctions. Keep in mind that our system is designed to adjust over time, so the longer you use CPA bidding, the less likely it is that your actual CPA will exceed your specific bid.
Example
Antoine advises that Fiona's ad campaign should use the CPM bidding strategy. After Antoine explains how CPM bidding works, Fiona wants to know how much she'll be charged.
Let's say the maximum amount Fiona wants to bid is US$2.00 and other advertisers' bids for the same ad position are US$1.50 and US$1.75. Fiona won't be charged more than what's needed for her ads to appear higher than the advertiser bidding US$1.75.
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