Have you ever wondered about the search results that appear in boxes at the top and off to the side of most Google searches? These are actually paid advertisements that are displayed through the Google AdWords service. For a price, Google AdWords can help businesses increase their presence on the Internet and target potential customers.
How does AdWords work? After signing up with the AdWords service, a user creates campaigns that contain sets of advertisements. Ads contain a title, two short lines of text, and a link to the user’s website. You can set the link to a specific page of your site that deals with the topic of the ad.
Google AdWords uses a “pay-per-click” advertising model. This means that your AdWords account is only charged when someone clicks on your ad. If a user sees your ad but does not click on it, you do not pay anything. You can set AdWords to charge for every thousand times users see one of your ads, but most prefer the pay-per-click model. It ensures that you only pay for the service when it is quantifiably generating interest in your website. You can also set a maximum daily budget for each ad campaign. If the budget is exceeded, none of the ads in the campaign will be shown for the rest of the day.
The amount you pay for each click, and your ads’ placement on Google searches and products, is determined by an auction format. Each advertisement is associated with particular keywords or phrases that the user wants their ad to appear in conjunction with. The user sets a price for each keyword or phrase. This is the price they will pay if the ad is clicked. The higher the bid, the better the ad’s placement will be. Ads for keywords with the highest bid appear at the top of Google Search results pages. Ads with a lower bid will appear on the side of the page. If the bid is too low, an ad may not appear at all.
AdWords ads are most often noticed on Google Search, but they can appear on many other websites that display ads through the Google AdSense service. Google refers to these websites as the Google Display Network. Ads that appear here will be targeted toward the content of the site. For example, ads for a precision machining shop should only appear on sites that are about precision machining or related topics. You can choose whether to display your AdWords ads on Google Search, Google Display Network sites, or both.
Although the AdWords interface makes creating an ad campaign easy, optimizing the design of your advertisements and campaign settings can be time-consuming. The search engine optimization experts at Image Management can give you additional help with your AdWords campaign.
Published on June 8, 2012