Okay, since I've touched on Adsense recently, I guess I might as well talk about Google's Adwords service. Maybe I'll get motivated, or bored, and put together some more detailed information at some point. Anyhow, it occurs to me that there are always a lot of people who are complete beginners. So, with that in mind, here is the first installment in a possible series of Adwords Guides.
Adwords and Adsense
I would imagine that most people are familiar with Adsense at this point. At the very least everyone is familiar with online advertising. Adsense is a context sensitive advertising system that Google makes available to web publishers.
I must warn you that unless you have a lot of traffic it will take you quite a while to see any sizeable Adsense revenues or get your first payment from Google. Anyway, you may wonder why I am talking about Adsense when this post is about Adwords. It's because Adwords is the other side of Adsense. The ads that are displayed via Adsense are created and paid for using Adwords.
These two services are like two sides of a coin. Google collects payments from advertisers when a user clicks on their ad and distributes a portion of it to the owner of the web site that displayed the ad. There are some complicating factors to consider, but I'll leave that for future installments, so don't worry about them for now.
Marketing With Adwords
The Adwords system is quite complex so I will gloss over many aspects of it today. However, the important thing to realize is that you have control over what your ads say, where they will appear, and how much you wish to spend. Of course, Google will prevent you from doing something that is counter to their policies. For example, there are product name and trademark restrictions that you could run afoul of.
To create an ad you will simply enter some data into a series of forms. You will type in a headline followed by several lines of text. It is that simple. However, this is also an area of great complexity, because you will eventually want to learn how to attract people to click on your ad without attracting people that are not in your target audience.
Your ads are placed into logical groups known as campaigns. This terminology reflects the marketplace and should be easy to understand. Campaigns are targeted in various ways, but for simplicity let's just assume you'll be targeting your audience by their country of residence. So, if you live in the United States, then you can target your ads to display to surfers who are from the USA.
One of the big selling points of both Adsense and Adwords is that they provide context sensitive capabilities. This means that Google analyzes a web page to determine what it is about. In all probability the post you are reading now will be about Google, Adsense and Adwords. As such, Google will try to display ads that are about these topics, once it has had time to do this analysis.
As an advertiser you get to pick which search terms you wish to target. For example, if I was paying Google to send visitors to this page I'd probably target search terms such as Adwords, Adwords guide, Adwords tutorial and Adwords beginner. That way I'd be pretty sure that people visiting my page were interested in what I was talking about.
You get to specify the maximum amount that you will pay per visitor delivered to you. However, you are competing with other advertisers and Google can decide not to deliver any traffic to you if other people are willing to pay a lot more than you are. To help you with budgeting you can also tell Google the maximum that you are willing to spend on your campaign on a daily basis.
Why Use Adwords
While this topic may seem self-explanatory, there are a few different reasons why you might decide to market a web page. A politician could choose keywords that targeted issues local to their community in an attempt to get the populace aware of their election platform. Generally though, Adwords is used to attract visitors to a web site in order to earn revenues.
Revenues can be generated by advertising, such as Adsense, or other types of advertising, such as affiliate links. As long as it is legal and doesn't conflict with Google's terms of service you can do it. Adwords is great for a brick and mortar company that has actual products and services of it's own to offer. Potential customers can be directed to a company web site at a known price per visitor.
This leads into a discussion on tracking, but that is beyond the scope of this simple introduction. Over time I'll create other posts that dig a bit deeper into more complex aspects of advertising online with Adwords. In the mean time have fun and good luck.
