subject: What is Paid Search Internet Marketing? [print this page] Paid search basically means that an advertiser will select key terms and phrases that they believe their ideal customer will use to search for their product and/or service and then bid to have their ads appear when someone uses those particular keywords or phrases. The various elements of paid search include keywords, ad structure, ad copy, landing pages, bid strategies, and testing.
The paid listings are placed along the top and sides of the search engine results page, usually referred to as sponsored links, and are ranked based on the money spent by the advertiser and the advertisement's effectiveness. The organic listings, or the results listed below the sponsored and mapped results, are simply gathered by the search engine spiders and crawlers and placed according to the relevance of the site to the search.
Additionally, the elements of paid search have sub elements. When considering the keywords for a paid search or PPC (pay-per-click) campaign, a business should consider what keywords to use and how many should be in the ad. The ad structure should be based on seasonality, type of business and the geography for which the business will cover. Ad copy considerations include ad titles and ad text. Bidding strategies for keywords will depend greatly on daily and monthly budgets and if the business offers retail or services.
Internet marketing ads are limited to a certain number of characters. This is where ad content is highly important. It is recommended that a business choose at least four service areas and create ads specifically for each area. From there determine what keywords are relevant and searched for each service area using both top performing keywords and long tail search methods. Lastly, it is important to consider when a paid advertising campaign will appear on a search results page, especially when submitting to tier 3 and 4 search engines (those other than Google). If an advertisement is appearing on a results page that is totally irrelevant to the business owners products and/or services, and it is clicked by a person who isn't really interested in the business, that is a waste of advertising and marketing dollars.
