You will be able to explain why search ads target what people ask for and social ads target who people are.
Think about two moments in the same mother's week. On Tuesday night her son brings home a maths test with a mark that worries her. She picks up her phone and types P5 maths tuition Tampines into Google. On Saturday morning she is scrolling Instagram while waiting for the laundry, not thinking about tuition at all, and a short video of a tutor explaining a fractions problem appears between her friends' holiday photos.
Same person, same need underneath, two completely different states of mind. Priya, who runs the maths centre in Tampines, can reach her in both moments. What she cannot do is reach the mother with the same ad, or find her through the same kind of targeting, on both days.
On Google Search, you do not pick people. You pick searches. You choose keywords, and your ad becomes eligible to show when someone types a search that matches them, so the words people type do the job that audience settings do elsewhere.
That makes search ads unusual. The person has already told you what they want, in their own words, at the moment they want it. The mother on Tuesday night has a problem, has named it and is looking for an answer. Priya's job is to show up with a relevant answer and make it easy to act.
Because the intent is already there, search ads do not need to create interest. They need to match it. A good search ad repeats what the person asked for, gives a reason to choose this business over the others on the page, and leads to a page that delivers. Lesson 5.2, Search ad text that matches what people typed, covers how to write one.
The limit of search is volume. You can only reach people who are already looking. If few people search for what you sell, because it is new or because they do not know it exists, search has little to offer.
On Meta, TikTok and YouTube, people are not searching for you. They are there for their friends' news or for something to watch while the bus crawls along, and your ad interrupts that. It has to earn attention from someone who did not ask for it, and then create the interest that a searcher already had.
The targeting works differently too. Social platforms let you describe who should see the ad rather than what they typed. The main levers are location, age and sometimes gender, language, interests and behaviours that the platform infers from how people use it, and your own data, such as your customer list and website visitors. You can combine these, and increasingly you can let the platform look beyond them, which lesson 4.2, Broad targeting and why platforms now push it, explores.
The advantage is reach. You can put an offer in front of people who would never have searched for it, such as the mother on Saturday who has not yet decided her son needs help. The cost is that most of them were not in a buying mood, so the ad has more work to do.
Put the two side by side and a practical rule follows. The same offer usually needs different ads for searchers and for scrollers.
For the Tuesday-night searcher, Priya's search ad can be direct: P5 maths tuition in Tampines, small classes, free trial lesson, book online. She already wants this, so the detail helps her decide rather than putting her off.
For the Saturday scroller, the same direct message would mean little. She is not thinking about tuition. The ad needs to start with something she recognises, such as a child stuck on a fractions question or the homework argument at the dinner table, then show what the class is like, then make the offer. Lesson 5.1, Ads that look like the feed, not like ads, goes deeper into how that kind of ad is built.
The landing page can often be the same. Both mothers end up wanting to know about P5 classes in Tampines and how to book a trial.
This is a useful exercise even if you only plan to use one platform at first, because it forces you to think about where your buyer is when they have the problem.
As a searcher, your buyer is defined by what they type and when. Mei Ling's searcher types custom birthday cake Punggol or number cake delivery, usually a week or two before a party. As a scroller, your buyer is defined by who they are and what catches their eye. Mei Ling's scroller is a parent of a young child in the north-east, who stops for photos of cakes with characters their child loves.
If you cannot write the searcher sentence, search may not be your first channel. If you cannot write the scroller sentence, you may not know your customer well enough yet, and Digital marketing foundations: strategy before tactics is the place to go back to.
In the activity below you will write both sentences for your own buyer.
Write one sentence describing your buyer as a searcher and one describing them as a scroller.
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