Search Engine Ads Explained in 10 Minutes (with Expert Tips)

What are search engine ads?

Search engine advertising involves paying platforms like Google, Bing, or Yahoo to display your ads when people search for keywords you pay for. Unlike organic search results (SEO), which take time to build, search ads appear almost instantly at the top of search results pages.

Google alone offers several types of search advertising options:

• Search Campaigns: Text ads on Google Search.
• Shopping Campaigns: Product ads on Google Shopping, dedicated for e-commerce.
• Video Campaigns: Video ads on YouTube.
• Performance Max Campaigns: Automated campaigns across all of Google’s networks, including Google Maps, Discover and Gmail.
• Local Services Ads: Connect local service providers directly with potential customers searching for their services on Google.

Ads can also look slightly different depending on the search engine. Here’s a keyword that triggers two types of ads on Google: regular text ads and shopping ads showing products directly from advertisers’ merchant center.

Setting up a search engine advertising campaign will differ depending on the ad type, but here are the core mechanics, in a nutshell:

1. Select keywords relevant to your business.
2. Create ad copy that will appear when someone searches those keywords.
3. Set a budget and bid amount (how much you’re willing to pay per click).
4. Your ads are shown when someone searches for your keywords and your ad wins the auction. The ad platform, e.g. Google, runs an instant auction whenever someone searches. It determines which ads to show based mostly on your bid amount and the relevance of your ad and landing page (the page visitors see after clicking your ad).
5. You pay only when someone clicks on your ad (hence “pay-per-click”).
6. You track performance and optimize for better results.

The first thing you need to check is whether your audience uses search engines like Google to look for what you offer. You can do that for free with the tool below - just type in the kind of product/service you offer or problem that your business solves and look at the search volume ( estimates the number of people searching for that term in Google each month):

If your competitors are running search ads, usually it’s a strong indication that you should do the same. Tools like Ahrefs can help you find out if that’s the case — specifically, you can:

• Identify which competitors are running ads.
• See which keywords they’re bidding on.
• Analyze their ad copy and landing pages.
• Estimate their ad spend and strategy.

You can see all of the above in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer. Enter your competitor’s domain, go to the Paid keywords tab and explore.