Paid Search in Publishing

Paid search in publishing is a very interesting topic because it gives insight into how magazine companies and those similar have been able to maintain relevancy in the digital age. In order to understand how paid search is applied to publishing we must first define paid search. Paid Search otherwise known as search engine marketing (SEM) is simply put the practice of obtaining traffic through purchasing ads on search engines such as google, yahoo, bing. There are many benefits for companies engaging in paid search, it can be targeted as in directing it towards a certain audience of demographic, it is trackable so you can see who is clicking and use those metrics to further benefit you, and it is a good testing platform for search engine optimization (SEO). Lastly, it is important to note that paid search may be referred to as PPC (Pay-per-click) or CPC (cost-per-click) marketing seeing as how a majority of paid search ads are sold on a CPC/PPC basis. 

The most prevalent form of paid search is Google Adwords. Google is undoubtedly the leading search engine as "Googling" has essentially become a verb on its own synonymous with searching something. Adwords is the clickable ads on Google’s organic results pages, they may appear at the very top of the results or the right side of the page. You can identify Adwords by the small ad box in green under the title tag, these are used by the advertisers. Publishing companies like any newspapers or magazines may use a simple Adwords ad when to appear as the very top results. Take New York Times for example, googling their name will result in a page of organic results leading to their sites as well as paid result at the very top, companies may use it to advertise different landing pages. NYTimes is a huge brand and if you directly search them of course they will show up, but their ad at the top differs from their organic results because it specifically pushes for subscriptions. This is beneficial for them in particular or subscription-based publications because they can expand on what they’re trying to offer you, they are specifically trying to sell their subscriptions here. For paid search, the way Google identifies where companies’ ads should be placed is through their quality score and bid amount. Quality score is a measurement of how relevant ads, keywords, and landing pages are to a person seeing your ad. When trying to input queries for art magazines, newspapers, or anything along those lines of broader searches, I find that there are little to no paid search ads by big publishing companies. But as mentioned earlier a direct New York times search will prompt an ad of there’s, this is interesting because when determining a pages quality score, I figured with how many different articles and stories these papers of magazines are involved with, they are more prone to appearing in organic searches. The bigger names do not need as much of a fight for paid search but utilize it where they can, as talked about earlier, NYT is pushing their subscriptions through ads. Otherwise you’re more likely to happen upon their site just off one of the many articles they produce daily. Let’s delve more into their subscription services. When simply searching newspaper subscriptions we receive paid search ads in this order top to bottom: New York Times, Bloomberg, and Wall Street Journal. Why do they appear in that order? This is a lesson on the Google auction process. Google places these ads in that order based off their ad rank. The formula for adrank is =(Quality Score) x (Maximum Cost-per-click). With the quality score being a numerical value from1 to 10 that Google assigns to each keyword. There are three bidding types: Manual bidding, automatic bidding, and enhanced CPC. Manual is the default method where you tell Google the maximum amount you would spend per click. Automatic is when Google sets the amount for you and tries to maximize the clicks you get. Lastly, enhanced CPC google Adjusts the companies bid based on how they think the keyword will convert in a given auction. Looking at the order my search generated these newspaper subscription ads you can infer that Wall Street Journal paid Google’s minimum price requirement. Actual CPC is found by (ad rank of the advertiser below you/your quality score) +$0.01. Bloomberg has a better quality score than WSJ.

How else can publishing companies benefit from paid search? You may find that inputting relevant queries into Google’s search that have to do with magazines and newspapers do not generate many paid search ads. Newspapers may not be engaging in making their own paid search ads because they do not have as much to really sell people. Due to this, you may notice different, more prevalent relationship between companies along this line and paid search. If you go to the New York Times home page you will notice they have ads running for other companies at the very top and as you scroll through. These are a format of text ads on the Google Display Network labeled magazine ads (funny enough). You may notice them often on landing pages if you don’t have adblocker. According to searchengineland.com these ads actually have lower cost per clicks generally. They come with drawbacks like identifying the hyperlink of the paying company but for the hosting site, these are one of the ways publishing companies are able to generate revenue and fight to stay afloat in the digital age. This is not too dissimilar from old school ads in physical newspapers, these companies are simply acknowledging the times and transitioning to sites. Offering subscriptions to digital versions of their pieces along with hosting ad space on their pages is how they can stay relevant.