And Then There Were Adwords…An Introduction



Adwords is the name of the pay-per-click system offered by Google on its search engine as well as search engines it supplies advertisements to on the net. Sort of anti-climatic, but I couldn’t think of anything more dramatic.

In the world of Internet marketing, search engine optimization is the best way to make significant sums of money. You pursue search engine optimization by tweaking pages so that they appear high in the search results for a keyword you would like to be listed under. For instance, you might be a poet and have your site appear in the first few rankings on Google, Yahoo and MSN when someone searches for “poetry." To do this, you would optimize your pages, a subject beyond the scope of this article.

One problem with search engine optimization is it is a tricky beast. Not everyone can get high rankings and, even if you do, it can take three to nine months to see the results of your work. That is a long time to wait, so the search engines came up with a short term solution. While they were certainly trying to be of assistance, it is also a good way for them to make money.

The solution is called pay-per-click advertising. There are various names, but the basic premise is pretty simple. While you wait for the optimized pages to get high rankings, you can create ads and pay for placement on the various search engines. As a result, you get immediate traffic to your site. On the downside, you have to pay for it which means you better be keeping an eye on your return on investment.

The pay-per-click service on Google is called Adwords and is one of the better ones out there. You create an account with Google, create a small advertisement linking to your site and submit a credit card. Every time someone clicks on your advertisement, Google bills you. Bidding is a subject unto itself, but that is essentially how the process works with Google Adwords.

There are a couple of downsides to Google Adwords. My biggest pet peeve is the size of the ads. You are allowed very little space, so qualifying traffic before they click your ad is pretty difficult. Click fraud is the second area that gets people hot and bothered. Essentially, you just have to accept that a certain percentage of clicks are bogus. I have problems with acceptance [a few girlfriend can verify that], so I try to get organic rankings as quickly as possible.

Overall, however, Adwords has definitely proven to be the best platform for me. Some hate it, some love it. You don’t have the right to rant one way or the other until you try it.