What Is Paid Search?
Paid Search is a unique opportunity to advertise your business to potential customers at the exact moment when they are looking for your products/services and only incur costs if they actually visit your website.
Paid search refers to all of the links on search engine results pages that are marked as “Ads” or “Sponsored Links” (these are typically shown at the top and down the right hand column). Advertisers can specify the search queries that trigger their ads which are charged on a cost per click (CPC) basis.
The order of ads is partly determine by the maximum amount you are willing to pay for a click and you can set a fixed daily budget to control your exact spend. Unlike the natural or organic search engine results, paid search can exposure your business to the very top of any search engine almost instantly.
Given the vast revenues paid search generates for the major search engines, including Google, it is in their interest drive as much traffic towards them as possible. Google allows advertisers to expand their ads to include location information, click-to-call from mobile, customer reviews and more. Other CPC opportunities now include product ads delivered via their shopping program. All of these increase the screen real-estate and therefore the opportunity of paid search.
