What is Google Adwords?

Google Adwords is the system Google has developed to assist you in marketing your products or services in the Google Search Engine, and its affiliate sites, via the use of a placed text ad that appears when people search for phrases related to your offering, this appears as a “sponsored link”. The system is a “pay per click” system, this means you can dictate where your ad appears through bidding for a series of phrases, but you only pay the amount you have bid for if someone clicks on your ad as a result of a web search, i.e. pay per click!

The ads take the format of a short text ad that includes a title line, two short descriptive lines and a URL link to a website or a specific website page.

The ad will appear on the page of results you decide you want to appear in. For instance page 1 of Google for a search result. The ads appear at the top and to the right of the organic search engine results. You can also pitch at what position on the page your ad will appear, through the amount you bid. Crudely this may mean the more you bid for a phrase, the higher your ad appears on page 1 of the Google Result.

Research shows us that 87% of web users do not scan past page 1 of search engine results. In addition, the higher your website appears on a page will result in more visitors to your website, as web users prefer to click on the ads/search results at the top of the page.

So why use Google Adwords?

It is now apparent that there is a difference between the types of visitor to a website: “browsing traffic”, or, visitors that may have found a website in a search engines organic result, behave differently to traffic that comes directly from Google Adwords or “pay per click traffic”. The reason for this is simple: traffic via surfing in organic results is simply often browsing for information where as traffic via pay per click knows that when they are clicking on a ad, it is simply that, an ad and that the advertisement is for something they need and want to buy, whether that be a product or services. Therefore, you don’t necessarily need millions of visitors via browsing, rather than specific targeted visitors via Google Adwords.

Its not quite as simple as that!

Sorry to say, yes you can pitch the highest bid for phrases and gain some great positions and traffic. You could set up a Google Adword Account and Campaign in a matter of minutes, but without Google Adword Management, you will find often that not only will your budget get used up and not result in any sales or enquiries, but the traffic you do send via this method to your website, may be disappointed when they get there if the page they land on is not relevant to their search: they will simply click away and you will have lost budget and a potential customer.

In addition, through effective Google Adword Management, not only will your campaigns become more effective in driving relevant targeted traffic to your website, the amount you bid for with your desired phrases may be less than your competition and in many instances your ad will appear higher in the Google search result even though you are bidding less than your competitor for a phrase!

How can this be?

When deciding who gets top billing among the sponsored links for phrases, Google factors in bids and how many people click through each ad, giving preference to the more effective ads. If an add and its destination are relevant to the phrase marketed, it is more likely to gain a visitor via pay per click, and one that is relevant and potentially more likely to become a customer.