Today, we’re going to cover something that confuses a lot of people when they’re trying to learn Google Ads and what it is.
We’re going to talk about the search network vs the display network. We’re going to show you what they are and show you some actual examples, so let’s get started.
Today’s the next video in our PPC Q&A session. What is the difference between the search network and the display network? Let’s hop right in and show you some examples.
Search Network Appears When Somebody Is Doing An Actual Search For An Answer
Let’s start at Google.com. If we search for an electrician, this is the search network, what you see right here that comes up with these little, green boxes that say ad. We have one, two of them here, and then down at the bottom we have three more.
That’s the Google search network. When somebody is doing an actual search for an answer, that’s when you’re going to see the ads. You will also see these ads on what are called Google search partners.
They’re non-Google websites that have said, “You know what, Google? We are willing to put your ads on our website, and if somebody clicks on one of those ads while they’re on our website, we’re going to share the revenue.”
Display Network Is A Collection of Websites That Shows Google Ads
So, the display network is a collection of websites, including Google specific websites like Google Finance, Gmail, Blogger, and YouTube, and these websites show ads, but these are usually like visual ads or what we call display ads.
Now, when you ask what websites Google will show them on, there’s a ton of them. In fact, there’s over 2 million sites, and it reaches essentially over 90% of the people on the internet, so your ads can appear across a large collection of websites, mobile apps, and video content. Let’s show you some examples.
If you go to Reddit … These are places where our display ads have been shown over the last year. So, if you go on Reddit, you scroll down, you see this Toyota ad, this advertisement right here. This is a Google display ad, and this will change probably every time you refresh this.
So, let’s refresh it once and see if the ad changed. Nope. Same ad. Okay. Let’s go to a different one. The Zoe Report is like a fashion website, and you scroll down, and you see Canadian Mist Apple cider. That’s another display ad. CinemaBlend. You can see right here, right at the top of the website Elementor 2.6 Pro.
Now, this is a display ad being shown to me, because I happened to be looking at this product on their website within probably the last week, so they’re retargeting me. This one, Healthline, if you scroll down, GNC has an ad right here. And a few others. eBay right here.
Display Ads Are Also Called Retargeting Ads
Right at the top, GoDaddy. This ad is being shown right here. Now, the thing about these display ads is these are also what we call retargeting ads a lot of the time, and as you can see, when I go back to eBay here, I refreshed it, and here is another ad being shown for Elementor, because they’re retargeting me.
So, you can see two completely different websites with the same ad being targeted at me. And I, look, refreshed NDTV right here. The ad pops up again.
Now, if you have a display campaign already running, here’s how to see where your ads are showing. Open the campaign. Go down to placements, and click on where ads showed. It will pull up all of the different websites.
You can see, website, mobile applications, YouTube channel, so on and so forth. You can click there, and you can click on these, and it will take you to the actual site.
So, you can see the majority of the impressions for this campaign are actually being shown at mail.google.com, which is essentially Gmail.
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Thank you for checking our post on: Difference Between Search And Display Ads
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