Inside Google AdWords

For those unfamiliar with Google Adwords, they are the advertisements which appear in a table to the right side of your screen when searching Google. These are paid advertising spots where advertisers bid on keywords to determine their ads placement.

The most clear benefit of the Google Adwords system is that you only pay for click throughs, so in other words, you are paying to have each visitor come to your site.

On the flip side of this, Google Adwords is not going to generate you any free traffic such as a search engine might.

Google does have guidelines where all ads must receive a minimum percentage click through or underperforming keywords are removed.

Also, dont think that you can be tricky with your wording and trick visitors to read your ad and click. There are real associates of Google, not robots looking at each ad, and then each site, to ensure that what you are advertising in your ad is what is reflected on your website.

The staff also will not accept any ads where symbols are used instead of words. An example of this might be trying to use a "+" sign to save on character usage over using the word "and." They will not allow this and will disable your ad until you have fixed the problem. Going along with this, they will also forbid you from using any abbreviations.

There are also no pop-ups allowed on the site that you are sending your visitors to. Dont try to sneak in an exit pop-up because they check for that too, and your ad will be disabled if they find one.

Opening an account is really easy to do. There is a very short sign-up process where you open your account, select your keywords, submit your ad, set your daily budget, set your maximum click through rate and submit your payment to Google.

HINTS:

When you submit your headline or title make sure that its a short phrase that includes your main keyword. This is going to be what the searchers look for first. Some might not even read your ad, they may click on your ad because of the headline alone.

As a rule of thumb, try and secure position 2 or 3 when bidding on keywords. Position 1 will get you more clicks, but they are going to be people who just click on the first relevant link they find, and may not be the best buyer for you.

Dont forget about using common misspellings in your keyword list.

If you are finding that you are getting a lot of visitors to your site, but no buyers try and include a negative qualifier within your Google ad. The most widely used negative qualifier is going to be price. If the product that you are selling at your website is $30, list that within your ad, and it will stop people coming to your site who are only interested in free information.

There are a lot of pluses and minuses to using Google Adwords. The only way you are really going to know if this type of system will work for you, is to give it a try. You can turn on and off your ad campaigns with the click of a button, so there is very little risk. Remember, dont set your daily ad budget too high until you see if the visitors are converting into buyers.

You can setup your account with Google AdWords at: http://adwords.google.com