Channels and formats
What is paid search?
Free, with no card. We read your homepage, draft who buys from you and show your monthly price before you join the waitlist. Nothing is bought until you've approved the plan and the ads.
what it means here
Here is what the term means for a UK buyer
The definition above holds anywhere. Buying media in the UK adds the detail below, including where AdBuyMCP does something different.
Search took £17.9bn of a £46.7bn UK market in 2025, on AA/WARC figures published in April 2026. It reaches the buyers who are already looking. An AdBuyMCP awareness plan leaves it to you and reaches the rest of your market before it starts looking, on out-of-home, streaming TV, podcasts and ChatGPT ads. In AdBuyMCP's catalogue, search is the channel where the fidelity score moves most with the quality of a brief: buyer-authored intent topics score 82, interests without intent 68, and a persona label with no product context 45.
Type your company website or work email to see who we think buys from you and what reaching them 3, 5 or 12 times a week would cost.
Free, with no card.
related terms
These terms sit next to this one
Most confusion in media buying comes from two adjacent terms being used interchangeably, so these are the neighbours worth reading next.
CPC
The cost of one click on an advert, and the standard price unit for paid search and for much of paid social, where the advertiser pays for a response rather than for the impression that produced it.
In-market and out-of-market buyers
In-market buyers are the businesses actively looking to buy in a category right now; out-of-market buyers will buy in that category at some point but are not looking yet. In B2B the out-of-market group is usually far larger, because companies replace most suppliers only every few years.
Attribution
Assigning credit for an outcome to the advertising touchpoints that preceded it, according to a rule the advertiser chose. It describes correlation in a conversion path, and it cannot show on its own that the advertising caused anything.
same group
These terms are also in Channels and formats
The channels UK advertisers buy, and the words the sellers use for them.