How Does Search Advertising Work? A Marketer’s Guide to the Basics of Google PPC

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Search advertising is a marketing tactic that puts targeted messages in front of users who’ve expressed interest in a specific topic. But how does search advertising work, really? We’ll break it down from soup to nuts in this guide.

Search Advertising
How Does Search Advertising Work? A Marketer’s Guide to the Basics of Google PPC
Definition of Pay-Per-Click
How Does Search Advertising Work on Google?
Google Ads Keywording and Bidding Strategies
Common Google Ads Mistakes
The Best Google Ads Tools
How Does Search Advertising Work? In Conclusion
FAQs
Before we start, a point of clarification:

PPC is technically any form of digital advertising where you pay by the clic how to save oman number in whatsapp rather than by the impression. (Impression-based pricing is called CPM, or cost per mille.) This guide focuses primarily on search advertising, the thing most people are referring to when they say “PPC” or “pay-per-click.”

With that out of the way, here’s what this post will teach you:

The definition of PPC
How search advertising works on Google
What quality score means
Common search advertising mistakes
Tools that help with Google Ads
Definition of Pay-Per-Click
Pay-per-click is an advertising format where brands (like you, probably) pay an outlet (like Google) when someone clicks on their ad. Impressions (i.e., someone seeing your ad) do not cost anything.

The opposite is CPM advertising. (That’s cost per mille, a Latin word for thousand.) In CPM, you pay $X for every 1,000 times your ad is seen. Clicks in CPM are free. Impressions in PPC are free.

Here, we’re talking primarily about search advertising using Google Ads. So when we say PPC, that’s what we mean.

How Does Search Advertising Work on Google?
Search advertising seems simple. But it’s really not, particularly when you’re talking about Google search advertising.

In 2013 or so, you’d build a list of keywords, write some basic ad copy and point to your website. Back then, that worked just fine. But the Google Ads ecosystem is nothing like that anymore.

The first thing you need to know about how PPC works on Google is what Google aims to do: Connect users with the most relevant, useful content as fast as possible.

(Well, that’s technically second behind “making piles of money.” But the point stands.)

That means Google is looking at search intent, not just keywords.

For advertisers, that translates to this: You need to think about more than your keywords and your ad copy.

The fundamentals of Google PPC are still pretty basic. When you use Google Ads for search, you’re promising to pay the search engine some amount of money if someone clicks your ad. In exchange, they give you priority placement over organic results earned from SEO.

(You can tell if it’s a paid ad because of the little “Ad” badge next to it.)

search advertising