Google Search Ads vs Display Ads – Which is Better?

While setting up a Google Ads campaign, one of the crucial choices you have to make is whether to show your ads on the Google search network, Google display network or both. This is quite an important decision as search ads and display ads behave differently and your overall campaign including cost per click, type of ad, audience targeting and even ad content would get affected as per the network you choose.

To understand whether Google Search Ads or Display Ads are better for your business, we need to first take a look at the pros and cons of each and how they work.

Google Search Ads:

Google Search Ads are the text advertisements that you see when you search for something on Google. They appear at the top of organic results. For desktop or laptop users, these ads would appear on the right of search results as well.

For most beginners to Google Ads, search ads are what they have in mind when they think of a PPC campaign. They know they want to target users that are specifically searching for the service or product they are selling.

For example, if you are a divorce attorney, then you would want your ad to be displayed to any user searching with the keywords ‘divorce attorney in (your city)’. It doesn’t get more targeted than this as the person using these keywords in Google is most likely looking for a divorce attorney and hence is most likely to contact you once they have clicked on your ad and seen your full sales page.

Display Ads:

These are both text as well as banner ads that you see while surfing the internet. You could be on someone’s blog, on a news website or on social media. You will notice text ads or more likely banners of various sizes showing up in between content, or just above, below or on the side.

If you click on these ads, then Google pays a percentage of the click rate to the site owner through its Adsense program. The beauty of these ads is that the user didn’t have to visit Google and search to be targeted. Google targets these users depending upon their past search history, the websites they have been visiting and the type of content they have been consuming online.

This is the reason why if you searched or looked at shoes at sites such as Amazon etc., you start seeing various ads related to shoes in other sites that you visit.

Google displays ads on third-party websites such as blogs etc., using either the site content as keyword reference or that particular users browsing habits. So keeping the above divorce attorney example in mind, say you have visited various blogs etc. and read above divorce. In that case, when you visit another website, regardless of its content, you may see the divorce attorney ad. On the other hand, say you are on a travel blog looking at things to do in Hawaii. In this case, Google may display all travel related ads such as hotels in Hawaii, flight tickets etc.

Pros and Cons of Search Ads

Pros:

1) Honestly as far as targeting an active buyer looking for exactly what you are selling is concerned, nothing comes close to Google Search Ads. It is highly likely that a person is in need of the product or service they are searching on Google. They are warm leads and not people who need convincing that they require what you are promoting. These are the users who are likely to convert into paying customers once they have clicked on your ad and viewed the sales page.

2) Google Search Ads provide you with complete control over who views your ad. You can specify exactly which keywords should trigger your advertisement along with other parameters such as the exact location of the user. Overall it can be quite accurate in narrowing down on your target audience.

Cons:

1) The biggest drawback of search ads is that it can get quite expensive, quite quickly. Already many marketers find it impossible to bid on first level keywords and even then, their ads may not get the desirable position to make any difference. Google Search Ads is probably the most expensive pay per click program on the internet right now. Mind you the high cost per click can be worth it if you have a brilliant sales page that leads to high conversions. However, for many small marketers, search ads is becoming completely out of budget.

2) The other drawback of search ads is that sometimes your chosen keywords do not have enough search volume. In this case, you either have to add many more keywords or look for long key-phrases that your potential customers may be using. To counter this, Google by default would use ‘broad keyword search’ where your ad is shown for even synonyms of your chosen keywords. However, in some cases this may not be ideal and would dilute the targeting of your ads.

3) Sometimes you may want more than simple text on your ads. Some products need the visual aid of banners or graphics. In this case, search ads will not help you as they are only text based with limited number of characters allowed.

Pros and Cons of Display Ads

Pros:

1) Display Ads reach millions of websites across the internet. Using display ads allow you to target users who are not specifically searching on Google. You have the entire internet open to you. Your ads will be shown to users depending upon the websites they are browsing, their location, age group, language and other content consumption patterns.

2) The beauty of display ads lies with its ability of remarketing. You can target users who have already been to your website or have searched for products similar to yours in the past. Remarketing allows you to pull back a customer to your website even after they have gone. For brand recall, this can do wonders. Remarketing also helps with those users who need time to make up their minds and need to see your ad a few times before they are convinced of buying.

3) Compared to search ads, display ads are cheaper and are more affordable by most marketers. For budget conscious advertisers, display ads is a better option.

4) Display ads give you the option of display banners of various sizes or stick to text ads. You can have visual ads with more content space to fully convey your sales pitch to a potential customer.

Cons:

1) There is only one major drawback in display ads where search ads are absolute masters. That is in targeting warm active leads. Remember in display ads the user is not searching for your particular product or service at the moment. Your ad and sales page needs to convince them that they should go ahead and buy what you are offering.

This can be quite tricky and the conversion ratios are not the same that you would get in a well-planned search ads campaign.

Display ads would need really well made graphics, good content and an excellent sales page to bring in more clicks and lead to conversion.

So Which One is Better?

Well, as you would gather from reading the pros and cons of each type of ad network, they both have their strong and weak points. There is no one better than the other. It all comes down to your specific situation, what you are selling, your goal and also your budget.

Most advertisers would choose to show their ads on both the search ads and display ads network in Google Ads. However, if you are doing this, our advise would be to create two separate ad groups with different ad text or graphics in each.

Remember the way you target a user varies depending upon the network. Therefore you cannot use the same ad content or even the same sales page for both.

For best results, spend time on creating appropriate ad content and landing page design based on the network where your ad appears. Remember to constantly check ad metrics within Google to know if you need to tweak anything to get better results.