Samridhi Bhatia | There are various ways of advertising your business digitally. When it comes to planning a campaign to market a business online, we all get into a confusion of choosing out of Search ads vs Display ads, making calculations and seeing what can be better.
So, while picking one out of these two formats, it’s crucial for you to understand the differences between them. Selecting the wrong format would fail to fetch the desired results.
Moreover, if you get it right, nothing could stop your business from being a successful brand. It would boost conversions for your business.
However, before you proceed further, take a quick look at what is Search Engine Advertising?
Search Engine Advertising and How It Works
Search Engine Advertising is one of the ways of paid advertising, and it is also called as pay-per-click or PPC, that makes your business visible on the search engines. It’s a great way to market your business online and compete.
Not only this, by paid advertising, you can directly target the audience in your area using Search Engine to check for your products and services.
A study has shown that Return on Investment on Search Advertisements is 300% more than that of a Display Advertisement.
Search Engine Advertising’s way of working is simple, and the beauty of it is that you can easily compete with your bigger competitors without spending huge cost on advertising.
In addition to this, it gives a chance to the owners of small businesses to target searchers based on their geographical location.
It’s a simple network. If you run a Search ad, it’ll appear only on SERPs. When someone from your targeted audience heads to Google and searches for a keyword you have bid on, the search term will trigger your ad, and it will appear in the search result page’s Ad section.
If they click on your ad and make a purchase, or fill out the form, it will take them to a landing page, and that page would be on your website.
The position of your ad could be on the very top or very bottom of Google. So, it’s been concluded that if you’ll compare Search ads vs Display ads, Search ads have a high CTR (click-through-rate).
Display Advertising
On the other hand, when it comes to the Display Ads, your target audience will get to see the ads only when they are on your website, but aren’t checking out your products and services.
Digital Display Advertising is one of the ways to create awareness about a new brand, new product, or a new service.
The other name of these ads is Banner ads, which are in front of your target audience whenever they’re surfing online, but not searching for the services or products you’re offering.
Let’s take an instance to learn it better!
Suppose there’s one user who is researching for some best destinations in India for vacations, and your ad appears on the page.
It isn’t necessary that whatever the content user is consuming relates to your business to display your ad.
So, what exactly is great about the display type of advertising is that it helps to create awareness of your brand among your audience and increases the demand.
It’s one of the strategies that you can use for introducing your brand to the established customers while they’re spending the majority of their time visiting the websites of their interest.
How Do Search Ads vs Display Ads Work Together?
There’s the fact that you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket, and it’s true in case of advertising too. When you talk about the most successful campaigns of advertising, these are the ones that make use of multiple media forms.
SME should follow a similar strategy while advertising its products and services online to earn money.
Clicks lead to purchases, and there’s no doubt in this. Usually, Search Advertising gets the compliment, and this is because it’s easy for you to track the exact way the customer is behaving from the impressions to the click or purchase.
However, what gets lost in this is the brand awareness that you’ve created by running the advertisement campaign in the display ad format.
According to some studies, around 27% of the consumers search for the business after seeing its display ad, and it gives a lift of approximately 59% in the conversion rate when the user searched related to an advertisement being displayed.
You can easily become successful in generating the revenue using either the Search or the Display ad. However, if you’ll use these two formats together, you’ll be able to get better results.
This is because using both the ads, you’ll be targeting your customers from all possible angles rather than just one, and this would make easier for your customer to be aware of your business at the time of deciding on the purchase.
Search Ads vs Display Ads: Which Ad is Better?
While we’ve made a proper comparison, it always depends on your PPC goals whether you choose Search Ads or Display Ads. What’s important is to know the key differences between both kinds of Ads so that you can easily tell which one would work better for you.
You can also run both the formats simultaneously to make out clearly as to which one works better for your business. Assessing the results would give you a better idea and make choosing one service relatively easier.
