If you’re brand new to Google Adwords and you’re trying to decide should I use the search Network ads or the Display Network ads and what the differences are, we’re going to discuss this in a bit detail.
In Google ad words we have two different options we can do search ads and we can do display network ads. With search ads people are going to Google google.com or google.ca fair in Canada or whatever country you are in and they’re specifically doing a search and you as the advertiser you’re bidding on that search term and your ad shows alongside the search results with there so it’s very specific, it’s kind of simple some of these searches you target that keyword and your ad displays with them. With display network it’s a little bit different. People aren’t explicitly searching for what you have to offer, they’re surfing the internet and you’re trying to get your ad in front of them based on different criteria that you set so there are very different types of targeting. With search network it’s keyword-based targeting so you’re targeting the search queries that people are typing into Google.com so when somebody does that search your ad shows up hopefully they click on it go to your website or landing page and then contact you and you get a conversation out of it.

There’s only one type of ad format and that’s a text ad so if you go to Google and do a search you’ll see an example of what those text ads look like and you can’t input videos or banner ads or anything like that it’s only text ads on there and your ads are only shown on Google’s search network which is a search network. They also give you the option of using their search partner network which are additional Google properties like YouTube and also third-party websites that use Google as their default search engine. So the best practice is usually to start with just using Google because if your costs per click are higher and you’re just starting out and then if you want to get more adventurous and expand a little bit more then maybe include their partner network searches. So, the advantage with search is you can do much targeted ads so somebody does a specific search you can actually serve them back very specific ad in response to that search that they did with. With that being said it costs more because typically these are people who are closer to making a buying decision so there are more towards the bottom of the funnel, more competent people are competing and these costs per clicks tend to be more because of that.

Now when it comes to Google display network, people are searching online but they’re not searching for what you have they’re kind of surfing the net and you’re trying to get your ad in front of them. As far as targeting goes you can target by demographic, you can target by interest, you can target by keywords and you can target by placements. So you can target by age, gender, location, things like that. What type of interest they have so if you’re a landscaper maybe choose people interested in home and garden or finance if you’re a financial planner. You can choose keywords not the same as search because people aren’t explicitly searching for things here but you can choose keywords for pages where you want your ads to display. So if you’re in a hot tub company you can choose hot tub type terms to try to get your ad shown on pages that have hot tub type content and hopefully those people that are reading it have an interest in hot tub and drive traffic to your website or your ad. You can also do placements where you can specifically pick what websites you want your ads to show on. The nice thing with Google display network is they have partnerships with millions of websites. Although, it’s not as targeted as ‘Search’ because these people aren’t really searching for what you have to offer.