Search engine marketing places your website at the top of the search engine results page (SERP), such as Google or Bing, labeled with a sponsored ad tag. On the other hand, display advertising allows you to place banners on websites with audiences interested in your product. While SEM continues to play a role in driving traffic to its website, the increase in display advertising cannot be ignored. For your company to reach a highly segmented audience and attract more traffic to your pages, programmatic advertising (and graphic advertising) could be your best option.
The main difference between Google search ads and display ads is that search ads are a form of “attraction”, while display ads are “push advertising”. In other words, search ads are only shown to those who are already searching for your product or service, while display ads are paid locations that appear based on various targeting parameters. These are services that a person normally won't take advantage of or pay for if they're reading the news and, by chance, they see your display ad. Although Google display advertising still originates from the Google Ads interface, display ads work very differently from paid search ads.
Paid search advertising is one of the most popular forms of PPC advertising in which brands pay (using an auction-based model) to have their ads displayed above and below organic search engine results when users search for certain keywords. But, while Wikipedia defines SEM as “a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility on search engine result pages (SERPs) mainly through paid advertising, it's not that fast to call them exactly the same way. If your brand or the products you're selling have a good search volume, it's a good idea to start with a search engine advertising campaign. The reason why search ads tend to generate more conversions than display ads is because the Search Network connects advertisers with people who are actively searching for products with greater intent, so they are naturally more likely to convert.
These are services that it's likely that someone won't pay for while reading a blog article or browsing Facebook and, by chance, seeing your display ad. And, while PPC is often the largest and most demanding component of SEM, both PPC and SEM are payment initiatives that offer real-time data, ROI and protected data that can only be accessed by advertisers on certain platforms. It's an imperative decision, as using the wrong ad format could waste a significant percentage of the paid advertising budget. This is a similar approach to display advertising: although people who see display ads tend to do something else on the Internet, you can target a specific audience to pay attention to your ads and make your investment worthwhile.
And, as the opportunity to advertise on social media continues to grow, it is also often used to refer to paid advertising on those networks.
