Adwords Essentials: Difference Between Google’s Search Network and Display Network

Understand the difference between Google’s Search Network and the Google Display Network when you are using Adwords

Adwords Essentials: Difference Between Google’s Search Network and Display Network

Understand the difference between Google’s Search Network and the Google Display Network when you are using Adwords

Google Advwords can be an incredibly powerful method of online marketing for your business. If you are new to Google Adwords and Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising then there can be a lot of terminology used that can at first glance appear confusing and may put you off investing in PPC advertising for your business. In this first of an occasional series I will try to demystify some of the common questions I am asked by clients when they first become interested in online marketing.

One of the first concepts that an advertiser needs to get to grips with is where your advert will appear. People think that a “Google ad” will only appear on the Google website when people conduct related searches. However, this is not the case, depending upon the way that you have configured your Adwords campaign your advert could appear on Google, AOL, You Tube and many other non-Google web properties. The key to advertising on these other sites is knowing the difference between Google’s Search Network and Google’s Display Network.

Google Search Network

This is the way that people traditionally think about advertising on Google. You place an ad that is triggered when a user searches on Google for a particular term or keyword. Google’s Search Network is composed of:

  • Google
  • Google Images
  • Google Maps
  • Google Groups
  • Other search websites that use Google for their results

Your advert may appear on a Google search engine result page (SERP) in one of two places. Your ad could be one of three ads that are shown above the organic results or it could be on the right of the page. In either case these sections of the page are marked as ads.

Google SERP showing ads above and to the right of organic results
Google SERP showing ads above and to the right of organic results

Websites that are near to the top of the organic results get more clicks than those lower down the page and this will lead to many companies hiring a search engine optimisation specialist to help improve their rankings. The same is true of Adwords, the higher the position of your ad on the page the more clicks that it is likely to get. I will talk more about how Google ranks ads in a later article. Ads on the Google Search Network are text ads.

Google Display Network

The Google Display Network is a completely different proposition to the Search Network. The Display Network includes a collection of websites that carry Google sponsored advertising on them including Google Finance, Blogger, YouTube and GMail . In addition to these websites there are also mobile apps that carry advertising and these ads could potentially include yours.

The ads on the Google Display Network can be text, include images and even video depending upon where the ad will be displayed.

If you choose to advertise on the Google Display Network then you can use a number of methods to target where your ads will show. You can use keywords or topics and Google will try to match your ad to websites that are relevant to the keywords or topics that you have selected. You can also choose specific websites on which you want your ad to appear. If you select the sites yourself then this is termed manual placement. If you let Google decide which sites to place your ads then it is known as Automatic Placement.

In this article we have looked at the different types of places that your Google advert may show on. I hope that it has helped you to better understand one of the fundamental basics of online advertising.