Google and Bing, along with other Microsoft web sites, are the most popular search engines worldwide. These tools are used every day by millions of people on the planet to meet their needs for information on all kinds of topics and issues. If you are a regular user you will have noticed that, along with the so-called natural or organic results, both Google and Bing show ads related to the words we are looking for.
These are the advertising networks of Google and Microsoft, “Google Ads” and “Microsoft Ads” respectively. They allow publishing ads on their search engines (the “search network”) and on other third-party websites.They reserve their advertising space for those search engines’ ads in exchange for a commission.
The main advantage over other types of online advertising is that these ads are displayed according to the keywords we have chosen for our campaign, and match what users are looking for. Also, we only pay for each time users actually click on the ads, that’s why its called “Pay Per Click”, or PPC. We don’t pay each time the ads are shown, as is the case with another advertising model called “Cost per Thousand Impressions” or CPM.
This form of advertising has created a huge business for those companies, and a new online marketing signature called “Search Engine Marketing” (SEM).