ruby on rails blog

Google and its child

As a search engine, Google’s primary purpose is to locate and organize that little thing known as the internet. Acting as the intermediary between information and the end-user, such as yourself, Google allows users to enter a search query and click search.

Google returns a multitude of resuslts: web pages, files, websites, images; these results are displayed on the left side of the page. Unlike other search engines, Google doesn’t accept pamyent to place websites higher in the search results.  However, Google does allow advertisers to purchase an AdWords ads which appear in parallel with unpaid results.

Why AdWords?

Each month over 80% of Internet users in the US view AdWords Ads…and this doesn’t even include the hundreds of millions of additional worldwide users! AdWords allows you to create simple, effective ads to display to people who are already looking for something related to your business. Gone are the days of irrelevant banner ads, Google has ushered in a new era of keyword-based advertising.

Let’s say you’re looking for some baseball tickets to the Mariner’s game, you’d likely search for "mariners tickets." In addition to search results, Google would display ads on top of and to the right of your search results. Say you’re buying media against the keyword "mariners tickets", you could be advertising directly towards individuals already looking for your products!

If this excites you, check this out…just recently, AdWords has branched out from solely internet advertisting to print, radio, TV, image, video and mobile ads.

But I only offer local products or services!

Great! It’s a common misconception that just because you offer local services and don’t ship products, you won’t see a benefit from an AdWords campaign. AdWords allows you you to target ads to specific geographic locations. If you were buying keywords for your massage business, users searching for "seattle flower shops" would see your ads, but users searching for "portland flower shops" would not. Not only will you appear on Google’s search pages, if selected, you would be eligible to appear on Google maps (maps.google.com) and any other sites that have opted into Google’s search network.

I don’t have a large budget to burn

One of the beauties of AdWords is the complete and total control it offers. You can run a media campaign without any minimum spending requirement. You set your budget, and AdWords works with you. By selecting different advertising models you control whether you pay for actual clicks, known as cost-per-click (CPC); or whether you pay for actual ad views, known as cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM).

You can run a successful campaign for $10 a day!

In closing

AdWords offers businesses an avenue to reach an audience that is highly relevant, and highly receptive. There’s no way I can cover all the features in a quick article. If you’re interested in pursuing an AdWords campign, feel free to do poke around at the Google AdWords site or send me an email.