There are two way that people can reach your website; the first is through organic search and the second is through paid search. The difference between them is that organic means that people find you strictly though the term that they search for and the results that come up. Paid on the other hand is when you pay for an ad and it shows up on a search page or display network, because that is where you paid for it to show up, and the person reaches you that way. According to HubSpot data, most searchers click on the organic results – in fact, over 70% of people click on the organic search results, while only 30% are likely to click on the paid links. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use paid ads – paid ads are great if your search engine rankings are band and you need exposure.
Moving on to ads. There are different forms of ads and ways that they can be distributed. Google has outlined a few for us.
- Text ads: The simplest and most common kind of search ad, text ads are made up of a headline, a display URL that shows the address of your website, and a description.
- Ads with extensions: Ad extensions are visual enhancements to search ads that more prominently display information about your business, such as a phone number, location, or links to other pieces of relevant content from deeper within your sitemap. You can add these enhancements, which often appear in ads above search results, manually or they can be added by our automated formatting systems.
Ads with extensions might use:
- Image ads
- Rich media ads
- Video ads
When using text ads key words are very important. Each keyword gets a Quality Score on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 is the lowest score and 10 is the highest. This will determine the quality of your ad. 
Why does your ad quality matter? The more relevant your ads are to the user, the more likely it is that you’ll have a higher Quality Score and benefit from having higher quality components of your Ad Rank, such as a higher ad position or lower cost-per-click.
Google lays out a few different bidding strategies for your ads.
- Cost-per-click (CPC): If you want to focus on clicks on your ads and drive traffic to your website, you’ll want to use CPC bidding.
- Cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM): If you want to focus on impressions — the number of times your ad shows — and increase awareness of your brand, you’ll want to use CPM bidding. Note that CPM bidding is available for Display Network campaigns only.
- Cost-per-acquisition (CPA): If you want to focus on conversions — which is when people take a specific action on your website after clicking one of your ads — you’ll want to use CPA bidding.
You can choose the networks you want your ads to show up on. One option it to only display ads on the search network. The benefit of this option is that you’re connecting with potential customers at the beginning of the process when they are searching and gathering data. I think this is valuable because they haven’t formed all their opinions and haven’t been persuaded a certain way yet. This opens the door and provides you with a great opportunity to solve their problem. This method allows you to target people that might have looked at other websites related to you and your product. Once they have visited a website in the network and with the same keywords and products and you they will show ads related to your site. The second is to show your ads on display networks. Thirdly, you can chose to display your ads on a combination of the two.
You can get more specific by using location, language and device when targeting your ads. This ensures that you can reach your target market in the most effective way whether it is a mobile ad that is displayed on a mobile device or a location ad that pops up when people are searching near to you.
An important aspect of online ads and getting clicks is organizing everything. In Google AdWords training they suggest that under your account you have your campaigns, and within each campaign it contains one or more ad groups. Ad groups allow you to organize your campaign into sets of ads and keywords these directly relate to your campaigns, which can improve your Quality Score and help boost your ROI.
Jachan DeVol 