Sponsored Links – Targeted Traffic At Controlled Costs

Sponsored links complement organic search results as they are relevant results to the same user search query but they appear on the right side of the screen, visually separated from the organic results on the left. Whilst you cannot influence organic search results directly, search engine marketing gives you control over what and how is shown on the search engine result pages.

The guiding principle behind sponsored links is similar to organic search results: relevancy is key. The more relevant you are the search engines the happier because their users are happy and they give you, in exchange, financial incentives to continue to be relevant. What this means is that the more relevant your ads are to any given search query the less you have to pay for a click, or you can have more traffic coming to your site for the same amount of money.

Google, for example, uses Ad Rank to determine the ranking of the ads and the price advertisers have to pay. The algorithm weighs the CPC bid and the Quality Score of the ad. In case an advertisement is very relevant to a search query, it can appear above the organic results, but it will still have a different background and will be clearly differentiated from the organic results.
The factors that can enhance your ad’s Quality Score are as follows:

• Historical CTR
• The relevance of a keyword to the ad text
• Account history and performance in geographic regions
• The relevance of a keyword of its ad group
• The quality of the landing page

Having a good Quality Score can significantly lower the price you have to pay for a click or can get you more traffic for the same budget.