Those are the ads you see in the top 3-4 results upon searching for something on Google or Microsoft. Or bottom 3, if you scroll to the end of the page. Some results also display on page 2 and onwards, which is brilliant if you want nobody to see your ads. If that’s not your motive, then page 1 is where to be.

These ads are reactive in their nature. Someone needs to search for your keyword, for the advert to be shown. 

When building the campaigns you get to choose these four things: 

• The ad copy. What your target audience reads before deciding to click on it.
• Ad extensions. Phone numbers, lead forms, location, callouts etc.
• Targeting. Select geographical areas (down to postcodes), interests, search behaviour, demographics. These are all based on their Gmail account and browser cookies – if they don’t have either, Google will not know and they are labelled “Unknown”. 
• Exclusions. For example, if you want everyone in London to be able to see your ad for flower deliveries, but want to exclude Westminster because they are not really the flower-sending bunch. Exclusions let you do just that.

Search ads focus on the lower part of your conversion funnel. This audience is already quite far along in their purchase decision and want to find the best price-quality ratio. If your ads convey this, they will make their way to your site. 

The higher your advert quality score (QS), the lower your average cost per click is and the higher your impression share is. It also has a positive impact on your SEO efforts.

I’m sure you have seen at least one banner ad in the last 48 hours, unless you were totally off-grid. They are sometimes pesky and sometimes hilarious. 

They work brilliantly for brand awareness campaigns and for driving awareness. Say, you want to let your audience know you have a holiday sale going on. Or perhaps are launching a new product series. Good value for money. 

While your average clickthrough rate is 1/200 impressions, your average cost per click is also around £0.2. This means you’ll get 10K impressions and 50 website visits for about £10. The quality of this traffic is not the best, but they do get you a lot of visibility.

Banner and display ads cover the top of your sales funnel. It’s the people who do not yet know about your brand or who visited your site many months ago, when their nan recommended it to them. This means getting purchases from these adverts is unlikely, unless you run a remarketing campaign. 

It will increase your organic traffic, social media engagement, and search traffic for search ads. Especially on-brand keywords. 

Does not need advanced graphic design, as you can freely create a responsive or dynamic display campaign, where Google and Microsoft do the designing for you. All the AI needs is a bit of text and some images. 

Google own YouTube and YouTube ads are created in the Google Ads interface. You can compliment your YT reach with the help of GDN (Google Display Network), where you leverage their partner network of more than 2 million websites.

Video campaigns have similar cost-result ratios as you would see on display ads, with the difference of video through-view metrics. You cannot tell on a display ad how long someone spent looking at your ad – but you can measure this on videos. You will only pay for the 6th second of your ad (the first 5 seconds are free of charge), unless using unskippable format. This allows for some fun messaging tests.

You could also create sequenced campaigns, where you only see certain videos after watching the previous one. Control the narrative. 

The videos don’t necessarily need to be professional studio-quality, as very casual and shaky quality videos tend to outperform those studio videos in many cases. However, they do have to be uploaded to YouTube. Can be uploaded as an unlisted video, if you don’t want people to find them organically.

Remarketing is when you put together a custom audience of people, who for example: 

• Visited your website.
• Purchased a certain product.
• Viewed your YouTube video ad. 
• Have already seen or interacted with one of your previous adverts.
• Abandoned their shopping cart in the last 180 days.
• Viewed 3+ different pages on your website and spent at least 2 minutes and 10 seconds on your site.
• Or any other criteria, really. 

You get to choose who they are by including custom segments and excluding the ones you don’t want. For example, you could add everyone who added a product to their shopping cart and exclude the ones who placed an order. You create these segments by combining Google Analytics audiences with custom audiences that you have created in either Google Ads or Bing Ads interfaces. 

Remarketing ads can be targeted in one of two ways: 

1. Dynamically. This is where you let the AI match the correct content with the individual. For example, if they browse black Nike shoes, then they see the same type of shoe in their news feed as a product advertisement. Mainly used in Google Shopping campaigns.
2. Manually. You set the specific criteria and show the same type of ads to your chosen audience. For example, when they visited your yoga studio website through a Google search ads campaign, you can retarget them based on the UTM tag you added, offering a 25% discount to new customers (excluding the ones who already purchased in the past). 

In most cases you need at least 500-1000 unique people in your remarketing audience, or Google Ads/Bing Ads will not start  your campaign. This can also be achieved with a mix of retargeting and lookalike audiences.

Remarketing ads can be used as search campaigns, display banner campaigns, video campaigns or even shopping network campaigns through Google Merchant Center.

Ever searched for sporting apparel or other types of goods, and noticed a carousel-type product feed above your search results? Those are shopping ads.

There are two options here: 

• Free Google Shopping Ads Listings (oh yeah!).
• Paid Google Shopping Ads Listings. 

There are some eligibility criteria for the free Google shopping ads listings, so keep that in mind. That’s a really good way to test Google’s shopping tools for your business. There’s a lot more competition here, as free listings are limited and most businesses are already making use of these. 

Then there’s the paid side. Essentially, they are something between a search ad and a display ad. They get shown on interested searches when set up for keywords. They act as banner ads when set up for the display network or retargeting. 

When someone clicks on the ad, they are immediately directed to the respective product page in your store. The cost per click for these campaigns tends to be around the same mark as a normal search ad (somewhere between £0.5 – 2.0). Delivers high intent quality traffic.

When it comes to shopping ads, we have the tools and expertise to launch, manage, and deliver results.