Search Ad

Advertising spent a long time going out to find people. The limit of that approach is that the other person didn't come to look at you. A display ad, the banner laid into a slot on a page, may get clicked once per thousand impressions.

Search results work differently. Someone typing "meeting notes tool" is looking for one at that moment. The ad isn't going out to find a person; it's responding to a signal a person sent. Signup conversion from search runs several times what the same product sees from a feed.

What's fixed in exchange is how many people you can reach. If 400 people type that phrase a day, 400 is the ceiling. Doubling the spend does not double the arrivals. Past some point the extra budget starts flowing into broader phrases, where impressions rise and signups don't.

It runs by bidding on individual queries to compete for placement. Four things get set.

1. Queries and bids — pick the phrases to target and state the most you'll pay per click. When several advertisers land on one phrase, the order gets settled among them.
2. The placement calculation — money alone doesn't decide it. The bid gets multiplied by ad quality, where quality is how well the ad copy and the page it opens match that query. That's why an ad can pay less and still sit higher.
3. Match scope — choose whether the ad shows only on the exact phrase, on close variants, or on anything overlapping in meaning. Opening it wide raises impressions but bleeds budget onto irrelevant queries, so a list of terms to exclude gets written alongside.
4. The page it opens — a separate landing page, built to drive one action, per query is typical. When the query and the page diverge, quality reads low and the same placement costs more.

Money leaves on the click, not the impression. It's calculated as cost per click (CPC), and phrases with clear purchase intent draw competition and cost more.

"Search caps out around $2,300 a week for us. Above that it starts bleeding into broad phrases."

The size of the demand sets the ceiling.

"This query needs its own landing page. We're sending them to the homepage and the cost per click shows it."

The query and the page diverge, so the quality score is low.

"Add 'free' and 'jobs' to the negative list. Clicks are leaking there."

Match scope was opened wide and budget is going to irrelevant searches.

At Pagedeck, Ravi started with twenty-two queries split across three landing pages. On unambiguous phrases like "meeting notes tool" and "document collaboration," clicks came in at $1.50 with 6.4 percent signup conversion; on the broad phrase "collaboration," clicks cost $0.70 with 0.7 percent conversion, so it was switched off.