To understand how AdWords works, you’ll want to familiarize yourself with some of the key building blocks: where your ads can appear, the quality of your ads, and what you pay for them. You’ll learn about each of these in this module and the ones that follow.
As you learned in a previous module, your ads can appear in different places across the web, depending on how you target your ads, to whom you choose to show them, and the types of ads you create.
Showing your ads alongside search results
To understand how your ads are shown on the Search Network, let’s take a closer look at keywords .
You’ll use keywords — words or phrases that describe your product or service — to target your ads. When someone searches for terms that are similar to your keywords, your ads can appear alongside or above search results on sites that are part of the Search Network. Your ad could be eligible to appear based on the similarity of your keywords to their search terms, as well as your keyword match types, which we’ll explain in more detail later.
Keywords also help determine how much you pay. Each of your keywords has a maximum cost-per-click bid amount (or “max. CPC”), which specifies the maximum amount you’re willing to pay each time someone clicks your ad.
Search ad formats
It’s also important to think about the different types of ads that can appear on Search Network sites:
- 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.
Showing your ads on websites across the Internet
Google AdWords also will allow you to show your advertising on websites that your audience maybe visiting. This is called the4 Display Network.
You can also choose to show your ads to people as they browse the web. Your ads can can appear on specific websites or placements that you choose, or on websites based on the targeting methods that you choose, such as keywords, placement, audiences, and topics.
Keywords can trigger your ad to show on placements, which are sites across the Internet where your ads can appear. Google automatically determines where your ads appear by matching your keywords to these placements, or you can pick specific placements yourself for greater control over where your ads appear.
In addition to keywords, you can use different Display Network targeting options to show your ads to specific groups of people based on their interests, age or gender, or whether they’ve previously visited your website. We’ll go over these options in more detail later.
Display ad formats
Now that you know more about how your ads can appear on the Display Network, let’s look at the different ad formats that you can use. In addition to the text ads that you’ll see on Google search, sites on the Display Network show other types of visually engaging ads, too.
Here’s a list of ad formats you can use on the Display Network:
- Text ads
- Image ads
- Rich media ads
- Video ads
Example
Antoine, an account planner at Acme, has started building a marketing plan for Fiona’s new furniture line to help her reach customers on the Google Display Network. Here’s how:
- Add keywords about children’s furniture, such as “bunk bed,” and Fiona’s ads might be automatically matched to a blog about home decor.
- Identify blogs that cater to moms and children’s decor that Fiona wants her ads to show on, and add these sites as placements.
Showing your ads on mobile phones
Reach potential customers as they search or visit websites on the go — researching or completing purchases on their mobile phones, for example. Here are the different places your ads can appear:
- Text ads can appear when people search on Google and other Search Network from their mobile devices.
- Text, image, and video ads can appear on Display Network websites when people visit these sites from high-end mobile device (such as iPhones, Android devices).
Showing your ads to specific audiences
You can also show your ads to people in selected locations, who speak a certain language, or to specific groups of people.
If you have text ads, you can choose to show them to customers in an entire country, a certain geographic location, and even to customers who use names of locations in their searches. You can also target your campaigns to the languages that your potential customers speak.
Tip
It is good practice to segment different campaign types in order to optimize your ad’s performance. That means Search and Display networks should be in separate campaigns. Desktop and Mobile should also be in separate campaigns due to the differences in each audience.
Understanding Ad Position
Ad position is the order in which your ad shows up on a page. For example, an ad position of “1” means that your ad is the first ad on a page. In general, it’s good to have a high ad position because it’s likely that more customers will see your ad. Ads can appear on the top of a search results page, on the side of the page, or on the bottom of the page.
How Ad Position Is Determined
Ad position is determined by your Ad Rank in the auction. Your Ad Rank is a score that’s based on your bid and your Quality Score. If you’re using the cost-per-click bidding option, your bid is how much you’re willing to pay for a single click on your ad. Your Quality Score is a measure of how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to what a user is searching for.
To improve your ad position, you can increase your bid, or you can focus on improving your Quality Score. See the “Next steps” section below for more information about Quality Score and how to optimize your ad position.
Tip
Because of the diversity of websites on the Google Display Network, average position may be less useful in optimizing for performance on this network. If you want to measure performance on the Display Network, focus on metrics such as conversions and ROI. Read more on how to evaluate ad performance on the Display Network.
Where To Find Your Average Ad Position
In your AdWords account, you can easily see what your average ad position is. Let’s walk through the steps to view your average position:
- Sign in to your AdWords account.
- Click the Campaigns tab at the top.
- Look for the Avg. Pos. column in the statistics table. If you don’t see this column in your table, you can add this column by clicking the Columns button in the toolbar above the statistics table.
You can also click the Ads or Keywords tab to see your average position by ads or by keywords.
To see how often your ads have appeared on the top of the page, on the side of the page, or on the bottom of the page, you can segment your data.
Additional study materials
Find out more about how AdWords works.