Search & Display Advertising: What’s the Difference?
What is Search Engine Advertising?
Search engine advertising is a type of paid advertising, also known as pay-per-click advertising or PPC, that gets your business found on search engines. Search advertising is a great way to compete in the online space and directly target folks in your area who are using a search engine to look for your products or services.
The way it works is simple. Say you have a shoe shop. You were smart and placed a huge order of red, white and blue sandals just in time for the 4th of July, and you want to advertise on Google. When someone searches for a keyword you’ve bid on, like “red, white, and blue sandals,” their search term will trigger your text ad, which shows up in the sponsored section of the search results page. This gives you visibility on the page quickly and cost-effectively. Then, if your text ad is compelling enough, the searcher will click your ad, visit your website, and ultimately contact you.
The beauty of search advertising is that you have a chance to compete with the bigger competitors in your local market without spending an arm and a leg in advertising costs. It also gives small business owners like you a way to directly target searchers based on their geography so your ads only show to people who are around your store or service area. Search advertising is like having a billboard online, but your targeting is much more effective because it is only being shown to people in your local area who are actually looking for your products or services.
What is Display Advertising & How Does It Work?
Speaking of billboards, let’s talk about display advertising. Digital display advertising is a way to grow your brand’s awareness online. Display ads, also known as banner ads, are shown to your target audience whenever they are surfing online, but not searching for your product or service.
When your customer is online, it’s important to keep your brand in front of them as much as possible. Think of your own online behavior. How much time are you spending doing real, honest research for a specific service, and how much time are you spending just piddling around reading sports stats and barbecue recipes? We all spend much more time consuming information on our favorite websites than we do searching for something specific. So, it’s important to put your business in front of consumers when they are surfing the web because that’s where they spend the majority of their time.
Have you ever ordered a sandwich from Jimmy John’s? They make my other favorite kind of sandwich – and they’re also my favorite example of successful display advertising. Throughout my day at work, it seems like every website I visit has a Jimmy John’s banner ad somewhere on the site. That’s because Jimmy John’s wants me to remember their brand when I get a craving for a fast, yet delicious, lunch. And that’s display advertising.
Search Advertising vs. Display Advertising: How Do They Work Together?
We’ve all heard that saying, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” and it’s true in in advertising, too. The most successful advertising campaigns are the ones that utilize multiple forms of media. Small businesses should mimic that same strategy when implementing their advertising online to make the most of their advertising dollars.
When Sally searches for the perfect pair of red, white and blue sandals, she might see and even click on your text ad, but she may not make a decision right away. So you still need a way to reach her when she isn’t searching— with display advertising. The truth is, both of these tactics work to help you get more sales.
Harvard Business School’s Sunil Gupta says that because clicks lead to purchases, search advertising usually gets the credit for the sale because you can track the exact behavior of the customer from the impression, to the click, to the purchase. What gets lost is the awareness you have created by running your display campaign and helping that consumer remember your business in the first place. In fact, studies have shown that 27% of consumers conduct a search for a business after seeing their display ad, and there’s a 59% lift in conversion when users conducted a search related to a display ad.
Peanut butter is complemented by jelly and vice versa, which is the same with search and display advertising. You can be successful using just one or the other; however, when search engine advertising and display advertising are used together, they help you get even better results by targeting your customer from multiple angles rather than just one, making it easier for the customer to remember your business when it’s time to make a purchasing decision.
You may have recently heard that Google bought Admeld, which has created a lot of discussion about how the display story is starting to look a lot like the search story. You remember how it goes – Overture is ruling the search world and then all of a sudden AdWords launched in 2000. Then, seemingly overnight, Google becomes the owner of the majority of search market share with everyone else fighting over the scraps.
Many are now worrying that the display story may have a similar plotline, as Google clearly has its eyes fixed on display as the new frontier that it is.
The display story will not be the same as search. The market dynamics are just too different.
Consider the seven primary differences between search and display:
1. One is pull marketing. The other is push. Search customers are coming to you. In most cases, they’re saying, “I’m in the market for your product and I’m considering buying it from you.” Frequently, they are even saying, “I want to buy your product right now.” The consumer is pushing and the marketer is pulling. In display, users are rarely in that frame of mind at the time a marketer places an ad in front of them. They are usually doing something else – watching a video, checking in on one of their favorite social networking sites, surfing the web, researching, or something else. In this case, the marketer is pushing. The marketer is effectively saying, “I’d like you to consider my product” or, “I’d like to change the conversation a little (or a lot) and talk about my product.”
2. Where are we in the funnel? Search and display have their own centers of gravity in two different locations. Search is as close to the bottom of the funnel as possible for an entire channel. Display is near the top. It is perhaps best suited for creating brand and product awareness, though lots of direct response marketers have found performance success in display. More often the objective of display is and should be to widen the funnel – getting more consumers considering your product.
3. There is not much branding in paid search. This is very closely related to number 2. However, it is important to point out that display has pictures, video (sometimes), and sound (sometimes). These are the usual mediums for creating a brand, and creating a brand is almost always done before customers come looking for you. And if all things are equal (especially price and perceived quality), the consumer will almost always choose the brand they’ve heard of or seen before versus the one they haven’t.
This is why display is so important to all marketers. Because branding and awareness are so important, it is where the majority of advertising dollars are spent. ComScore President Gian Fulgoni estimates that, “direct response advertising accounts for about 80 percent of all ad dollars spent online, while in traditional media the situation is reversed. There, branding dollars are estimated to make up about 75 percent of the market.” Think about TV: there are currently far more dollars spent on branding than on direct response. Online marketers should be targeting these dollars because display can often achieve the same objectives as TV spend and do it more efficiently.
4. A different type of auction. Perhaps the three biggest successes in online advertising have been Google, eBay, and Overture. All of them were built around an auction, so it is no wonder as display currently emerges to a winnable channel, its pricing mechanism is an auction. Except the auctions for impressions are different. Search is a cached or hosted auction. Marketers specify in advance what they are willing to pay for a given keyword and that bid sits on the search engine’s server. This means that Google (or other) controls the optimization via smart pricing and other means. In display and the emerging RTB auctions, the optimization is maintained by the buying technology. This gives buyers more control in display – although with more variables and more unknowns to manage, the channel needs it. The auction is better served as a market-clearing mechanism that lets buyers be in control; there are simply too many variables that fall outside of the actual media being bought for a complex market to try to do everything.
5. Supply and demand. There are only so many customers in the world that will go to a search engine and type, “I would like to buy product x.” And of course, every marketer and product seller in the world would like to have more of those. There is and always will be scarcity around those kinds of customers, which is largely why search is so competitive and the keywords are so valuable (whether measured on a CPC or CPM). To create new supply in display, one of millions of publishers merely needs to add another page. Because an impression requires so little action from the end user, there is an abundance of supply. (In fact, as display improves as a channel, consumers will all likely see more relevant ads, and less of them.)
6. Google’s part in the story. Arguably, Google currently plays the most influential role of any player for both search and display. That assertion is less controversial in search given that Google.com is the publisher of search 65 percent of the time. However, it is shaping display significantly, though it plays a very different kind of role. In display, Google.com or Google-owned sites are very rarely the publisher; instead, it’s trying to become the primary conduit for connecting advertisers and publishers. Google can’t control the display market with the same ease or margin that it did search. The medium and large publishers and the large advertisers keep Google honest and competition strong.
7. The role of data. With display, the data play has no limits. With search, the data play has the limits of Google’s legal team and its fear of regulators. Data is the center of the display game. Much more could be said about the role of data in both mediums, but as Martin Le Sauteur, CEO of Acquisio has said, “Data is the new creative.” This is especially true in display. Methodologies of retargeting and user-based targeting are staples in display. Display cannot be successful without user-based targeting. Outside of keywords, search doesn’t allow for much user targeting at all. In the future, using data across search and display – especially using the data from search to target display – is critical to success.
1. Display Ads
The original form of online advertising, these are visual ads that appear on third party websites (usually ones that are related to your content or service in some way).
Display ads have evolved from the basic form of banner ads. Nowadays, display ads come as:
- Static images - these are your basic banner or square ads that appear around the content.
- Text - these are text ads that are created by algorithms to make text ads relevant to the surrounding content.
- Floating banners - these move across the screen or float above the regular website’s content.
- Wallpaper - these appear and change the background of a website, filling the whole page.
- Popup ads - these are new windows that appear in front of the website content; newly opened window displays the full ad so visitors can see.
- Flash - these are moving ads that “flash” different content at the viewer.
- Video - these are small video ads that autoplay or wait for the video to be played by the visitor.
Display ads are usually very affordable. If you contact the third party site directly, their rates will vary from site to site. If you go through a marketing site, they will charge you a base rate.
Some third party sites, like the Google Display Network, allow for demographic, geographic, contextual and/or behavioral targeting - all of which help you target the audience that would be most likely to be interested in your product or service.
2. Social Media Ads
In 2015, Social Media commerce totaled $30 billion in the US. It’s a marketing arena that is not only efficient but effective. Very similar to Display Ads, Social Media ads can be anything from a simple banner or image to an auto-play video.
Social Media advertising is great because you can target your audience perfectly. For example, Facebook’s targeting options include age, region, interests, educational background and more.
Here are two types of Social Media advertisements:
- Organic - creates loyalty and gives you feedback from your target audience; new form of Word-of-Mouth
- Paid - leverage promoted posts and reach specific people
The best platforms to target are:
- LinkedIn for B2B sales
- Facebook for display and top of funnel marketing
- StumbleUpon for amazing, attention-grabbing content
Other platforms to hit up if you have the budget for it:
- Google+
- Tumblr
You can prepare your Social Media campaigns yourself or you can work with a marketing agency to prepare your campaign.
3. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
The most dependable form of online paid advertising (and also the most common). SEM works based on keywords - you and other businesses like yours bid on keywords through search engines in an effort to get your website up higher on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
All SEM ads that appear in Google, Bing and other search engines are text ads. They’re listed at the top or sides of the SERP.
Paid ads can either be Pay Per Click (PPC) or Cost Per Thousand (CPM).
- PPC
- You bid on keywords and your results appear at the top of the SERP based on bid value.
- This is the best value package because you’re only charged when people click on the ad.
- Also, it’s the easiest to track during the campaign.
- CPM
You’re billed a flat rate for 1,000 impressions.- This makes it easy to apply a budget and you’re guaranteed a number of “shows” on the SERP.
- However, you risk overspending - if no one clicks through you’re paying for wasted results.
- Also, you can’t assess or track the campaign until it’s over.
You can also use SEM in the unpaid form by optimizing your website for keywords (also known as SEO). Search engines list the unpaid results based on relevance so improving the SEO of your site means you’ll be able to get more hits for free if you improve your site’s SEO.
The best platforms for SEM are Google AdWords, which allow you to create highly targeted campaigns; to make the most of your Google AdWords campaigns. Another platform that’s great for SEM is Bing, which has less competition than AdWords.
4. Native Advertising
Native advertising is those sponsored listings at the end of blog posts, appearing on your Facebook feeds and posted to other Social Media.
These pieces of content are integrated and camouflaged into the platform on which they appear. You can promote and post your Native Advertising through networks like Adblade, Adsonar, Outbrain and Taboola.
There are several forms of Native Advertising:
- In-feed
- Search ads
- Recommendation widgets
- Promoted listings
5. Remarketing/Retargeting
The best way to market to people who already know about your product and service is to remarket to them. Or retarget. Depends on who you’re talking to.
When people visit your site, you drop a cookie on them so that, as they travel around the web, your ads will appear over and over to remind them about your product or service.
This form of advertising is inexpensive and, if done right, can be more effective than PPC. It increases conversions because it reminds people of you who already know who you are.
You can try to set this up yourself on Facebook Remarketing, Google Remarketing and more. Or, you can use a third-party platform or provider to set up your remarketing campaigns - read our Retargeting Cagematch for the 4-1-1 on all of the available platforms you could use… and which are best.
6. Video Ads
While YouTube ads are the most popular and well known of video ads, there are actually several different formats, types and content options.
You can go the route of educational/informative. Or maybe you want to post a how-to. Try to pull on the emotional strings of your viewers by creating a visual story. Ideal for branding, especially if you have a product or service that is best demonstrated visually.
Whatever you choose, Video Ads are gaining in popularity because they avoid blatant advertising while also attracting the limited attention span of many YouTubers.
Once you’ve created your video, you can post to:
- YouTube/Google
- Vimeo
- Brightroll
- YuMe
- Hulu
- Live Rail
- Adap.tv
- Specific Media
- Tube Mogul
- Tremor Video
- AOL
- Auditude
YouTube also have the fun little Pre-Roll ads (those short… sometimes long… ads that appear before the video you actually want to watch starts).
7. Email Marketing
Hanging out with Display Ads back near the start of online advertising, Email Marketing is a cheaper, faster and effective form of advertising.
It’s a great way to build customer loyalty and boost sales; when you use an email campaign manager (see the list below) to prepare and send your emails, you can easily track how well they do and monitor your ROI.
Email Campaign Managers:
- MailChimp
- Constant Contact
- AWeber
- ConvertKit
- GetResponse
- Campaign Monitor
- Active Campaign
In order to succeed at email marketing, you first need to build a list of email addresses. You can do so by using quizzes, or you can put a simple Newsletter sign-up on your site.
Then, you can send email campaigns that focus on promotions, discounts, features or content you’ve posted to your blog. Most emails are short, sweet and to the point. A concise message makes it easy to get your point across and increase conversions.
Just don’t forget to check your region/country’s spam rules.
When advertising your business, there are three important factors to consider: visual appeal to grab attention, location to maximize exposure, and relevancy to improve response. This is why display advertising has become a popular practice in digital marketing today. With its visual and targeting capabilities, display ads offer many benefits to a business, from visibility to brand awareness. This post goes over the basics of what display ads are and how they can benefit your business.
What Are Display Ads?
Display ads are the paid advertisements that appear in front of users on website pages in the form of graphics. Display ads are different from Search Engine Marketing/Pay Per Click/ Paid Searchads, which appear on search engine results pages. This means that PPC ads appear only when a person is searching, and display ads appear when a person is surfing. However, display ads technically do still appear when a person is searching, because people often visit the web pages that show up in their search results. Display ad are commonly referred to as banner ads, but they don’t always take exact banner form. They graphics that can be a smaller square or rectangle, and can appear on the top, middle, or side of a web page.
Benefits of Display Ads
Display Ads are Visually Appealing
One of the first benefits of display ads is that, because they are graphic content, they can be designed and styled. Regular SEM ads (Search Engine Marketing ads)are text only and with character counts, limiting how effectively and quickly you are able to capture attention and convey your message. With display ads, you can use graphics, video, audio, and your company’s branding to stand out to users and attract their attention.
Display Ads Support Brand Awareness
The visual component of display ads also benefits your business by facilitating brand awareness. With a PPC ad, users have to read the text on the ad and then click through to a landing page to learn about the business and its offer. Since display ads are branded and styled, often with an offer, a user can gather information on your brand simply by seeing your display ad, no click necessary.
Effectively Target with Display Ads
When online advertising, it is important to target the people most relevant to your business. Just as with SEM and Facebook Ad targeting, you can create specific parameters for your display ads: which sites they appear on, which geographic area they appear in, which demographic or niche market they appear to. For example, a car dealership can target people of driving age who live in their zip code and are visiting auto-related websites. The benefit of targeting your display ads is that you can maximize your spend.
Increase Your Visibility with Display Ads
Although display ads target specific audiences, this does not mean they limit the visibility of your business online. Display ads give you the ability to appear on websites that are not only highly trafficked, but which are also related to the offer of your ad. Display ads benefit your business by getting you in front of a high volume of the right people, even if they’re not searching.
Display Ads Provide Data
It is important to be able to measure your marketing activities, such as by using Google Analytics, to track their performance. Display advertising platforms offer this benefit to your business. With the data it provides, you can know exactly how many times your ad or ads have been clicked. Being able to track your investment allows you to ensure you are getting the most out of it.
Display Ads Support Retargeting
In addition to standard targeting capabilities, display advertising also allows for retargeting. With retargeting, you can put your ad in front of people who have previously visited your website. This is a way to reach out to people who have expressed interest in your business, and who could still be considering your business.
Display ads benefit your business by reaching more members of your target audience and in a more impactful manner. Start taking advantage of imagery and relevancy today with this effective advertising strategy!
