Google Adwords

The success of any website does not rely entirely on the site itself. You may have a terrific idea for a website, offer an excellent product or service, or have an exceptionally designed site with superb content, but if you do not use the right strategies to advertise, your site will not attract the high traffic you need. Highly targeted traffic is one of the most important entities in the internet universe. Any website owner or administrator recognises the importance of driving traffic to a website. Attracting targeted traffic is a task that should be taken seriously for any site to succeed or make a profit. Fortunately, there are internet-marketing tools that help the website marketer to drive traffic to his website. One of the most significant and effective of these tools is Google’s Adwords.

Google is the largest search engine on the web receiving over 200 million queries each day through its various services. As Google is the most popular search engine today, webmasters are keen on having their websites achieve a higher ranking in the search engine results it provides. A high ranking can mean high traffic for that website. The search engine results page is also a great venue for advertisers to promote a product or service through ads and links. Consequently, Google launched its Adwords service, as a way for businesses to advertise products and services to a targeted audience. Google Adwords can guarantee instant traffic. In this service, Google displays relevant text based ads within its search engine results page termed as Sponsored Links. Whenever a particular keyword is searched on, these relevant links appear in a separate section giving excellent exposure to the sites listed.

AdWords is Google’s flagship advertising product and main source of revenue. AdWords offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads. The AdWords program includes local, national, and international distribution. Google’s text advertisements are short, consisting of one title line and two content text lines. Image ads can be one of several different Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) standard sizes.

History

The AdWords product was launched in 2000. At first advertisers would pay a monthly amount, and Google would set up and manage their campaign. To accommodate small businesses and those who wanted to manage their own campaigns, Google soon introduced the AdWords self-service portal.

Due to the complexity of building and managing AdWords accounts and the amount of money at stake, some advertisers hire a search engine marketing agency or consultant to manage their campaigns. This has allowed organisations that otherwise would not have the advertising skills to reach a global, online audience.

Pay-Per-Click advertisements (PPC)

Advertisers specify the words that should trigger their ads and the maximum amount they are willing to pay per click. When a user searches Google’s search engine on www.google.com, ads for relevant words are shown as “sponsored links” on the right side of the screen, and sometimes above the main search results.

The ordering of the paid listings depends on other advertisers’ bids pay for placement (P4P) and the “quality score” of all ads shown for a given search. The quality score is calculated by historical click-through rates and the relevance of an advertiser’s ad text, keyword, and landing page to the search, as determined by Google. The quality score is also used by Google to set the minimum bids for an advertiser’s keywords.

The auction mechanism that determines the order of the ads has been called a “generalised second price” auction. It is a variation of the Vickrey auction.

Site targeted advertisements

In 2003 Google introduced site-targeted advertising. Using the AdWords control panel, advertisers can enter keywords of interest, and Google offers to place ads on what they claim are relevant sites within their content network. Advertisers then bid on a cost per mille (CPM) basis for placement. Advertisers can also enter domains directly. Google will provide a list of related sites that you can select along with your entered site.

Site targeting campaigns are mainly designed for branding purposes, as the ROI will almost always be considerably lower than a traditional content-targeted campaign. Your ad will take up the entire ad block (as opposed to being 1 of 4 ads in a traditional AdSense ad unit), which will make it more prominent but cost quite a bit more.

The minimum CPM you can set on a Site-Targeted campaign is 15p.

AdWords distribution

All AdWords ads are eligible to be shown on www.google.com. Advertisers also have the option of enabling their ads to show on Google’s partner networks. The “search network” includes AOL search, Ask.com, and Netscape. Like www.google.com, these search engines show AdWords ads in response to user searches.

The “content network” shows AdWords ads on sites that are not search engines. These content network sites are those that use AdSense, the other side of the Google advertising model. AdSense is used by publishers who wish to bring traffic to their websites. Click through rates on the content network are typically much lower than those on the search network and are therefore ignored when calculating an advertiser’s quality score.

Google automatically determines the subject of pages and displays relevant ads based on the advertisers’ keyword lists. AdSense publishers may select channels to help direct Google’s ad placements on their pages, to better track performance of their ad units. There are many different types of ads you can run across Google’s network, including text ads, image ads (banner ads), local business ads, mobile text ads, and in-page video ads.

Google AdWords’ main competitors are Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter.