Where your ads can appear

To understand how AdWords works, you'll want to familiarize yourself with some of the key building blocks: where your ads can appear, the quality of your ads, and what you pay for them. You'll learn about each of these in this module and the ones that follow.

As you learned in a previous module, your ads can appear in different places across the web, depending on how you target your ads, to whom you choose to show them, and the types of ads you create.

               Showing your ads alongside search results

To understand how your ads are shown on the Search Network, let's take a closer look at keywords 

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You'll use keywords — words or phrases that describe your product or service — to target your ads. When someone searches for terms that are similar to your keywords, your ads can appear alongside or above search results on sites that are part of the Search Network. Your ad could be eligible to appear based on the similarity of your keywords to their search terms, as well as your keyword match types, which we'll explain in more detail later.

Keywords also help determine how much you pay. Each of your keywords has amaximum cost-per-click

 bid amount (or "max. CPC"), which specifies the maximum amount you're willing to pay each time someone clicks your ad.

Search ad formats

It's also important to think about the different types of ads that can appear on Search Network sites:

• Text ads: The simplest and most common kind of search ad, text ads are made up of a headline, a display URL that shows the address of your website, and a description.
• Ads with extensions: Ad extensions are visual enhancements to search ads that more prominently display information about your business, such as a phone number, location, or links to other pieces of relevant content from deeper within your sitemap. You can add these enhancements, which often appear in ads above search results, manually or they can be added by our automated formatting systems.
• Showing your ads on websites across the Internet

• You can also choose to show your ads to people as they browse the web. Your ads can can appear on specific websites or placements that you choose, or on websites based on the targeting methods that you choose, such as keywords, placement, audiences, and topics.
• Keywords can trigger your ad to show on placements

  , which are sites across the Internet where your ads can appear. Google automatically determines where your ads appear by matching your keywords to these placements, or you can pick specific placements yourself for greater control over where your ads appear.
• In addition to keywords, you can use different Display Network targeting options to show your ads to specific groups of people based on their interests, age or gender, or whether they've previously visited your website. We'll go over these options in more detail later.

• Display ad formats

  Now that you know more about how your ads can appear on the Display Network, let's look at the different ad formats that you can use. In addition to the text ads that you'll see on Google search, sites on the Display Network show other types of visually engaging ads, too.

  Here's a list of ad formats you can use on the Display Network:

  • Text ads
  • Image ads
  • Rich media ads
  • Video ads

  • Showing your ads on mobile phones

    Reach potential customers as they search or visit websites on the go — researching or completing purchases on their mobile phones, for example. Here are the different places your ads can appear:
    • Text ads can appear when people search on Google and other Search Network from their mobile devices.
    • Text, image, and video ads can appear on Display Network websites when people visit these sites from high-end mobile device (such as iPhones, Android devices).

    Showing your ads to specific audiences

    You can also show your ads to people in selected locations, who speak a certain language, or to specific groups of people.
    If you have text ads, you can choose to show them to customers in an entire country, a certain geographic location, and even to customers who use names of locations in their searches. You can also target your campaigns to the languages that your potential customers speak.