Understanding Google Adwords

So what are Adwords? Well Adwords is Googles own form of PPC (pay per click) advertising. When you conduct a search for a term on Googles home page the actual Adwords ads can be found down the right hand side of the page and sometimes at the top as well. These are easily identifiable because they are shown under the title sponsored links. In the middle of the page you find the free search results, so you may wonder what is the purpose of paid advertising? It is true that significant traffic can be brought to a web page through organic search results, but this in itself can often take a significant time to achieve through SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques, and this is beyond the scope of this particular article.

So moving back to the question, what is the purpose of paid advertising? Quite simply this form of advertising can have immediate effects in a relatively small amount of time. The actual process of setting up a Google Adwords campaign can be carried out in around 10 minutes and as the potential to show results in a matter of minutes. Ok, clearly nothing is as straight forward as this, and a little bit of work is involved before you can implement your campaign. When you are setting up your campaign you must ensure that it surrounds a tightly focused theme. You must have completed some work on Keyword research and be aware of the dominant keyword. The dominant keyword will be used in the writing of your ads.

Within each campaign you can set up a number of ad groups, each ad group will have it's own set of keywords and within each set of keywords you will also have a dominant keyword for each group. Each ad group should aim to have between 10 to 50 keywords minimum. The aim of any ad campaign is to appear high in the sponsored links at the same time achieving this with the least expense. One of the biggest factors determining this position is the CTR (Click Thru Ratio). This is governed to a large degree by how eye catching your ads are, and how relevant your keywords and ads are to the landing page of your website . Google awards a quality score based on good quality copy and it's relevancy to the landing page.

The CTR (Click Thru Ratio) if you were wondering is the amount of clicks per 100 page views. When writing the ads themselves ensure that you have the dominant keyword within both your headline and within the body of the ad. Remember good ads with good quality keywords and content leads to a high CTR, which leads to low cost and maximum traffic. When starting any campaign, start cautiously and understand the factors determining how much you pay.

1) How much you are prepared to pay for each click. This is known as your maximum bid and will not necessarily be the amount paid.

2) The second factor surrounds how many clicks you receive.

3) How much is your daily budget.

Start this small and see how successful your campaign may be. This should offer some protection from losing too many advertising dollars if you have not got your campaign quite right. I hope that this proves useful in clearing some of the mysteries involved with Google Adwords.