Search Advertising
What is Search Advertising?
Search advertising (also known as Sponsored Search) is a form of advertising which shows promoted search results at the top of the search results page.
Why is Search Advertising important?
Search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) work by listing the websites which are most relevant for a given search term. For example, when a user searches for “sunglasses” a search engine will list the webpages which it believes are the most relevant for the keyword “sunglasses.”
Advertisers can bid to feature their own webpages as a top search result on, despite not being the most relevant result for that given keyword. As users who search for a given keyword are likely very interested in the results, having your webpage listed can be very beneficial for the advertiser.
If a user clicks on the sponsored search result, the advertiser pays for that click. That’s why search ads are purchased by the advertiser on a Cost per Click (CPC) model.
See also
Search advertising is one type of advertising, also look at: