Saturday, January 24, 2009

AdWords Advertising Explained

By Justin Harrison

AdWords advertising campaigns are built around short, carefully worded advertisements. Although they may be limited in size advertising of this type can be very successful in attracting the attention of potential customers who will follow the adverts through to your website.

Two methods exist and they depend on where you are going to place your advertisement. During the set up process of the AdWords campaign you will be given a couple of options and you can decide to place your ad on the search or content network (Adsense) or you can place it on both networks.

Search network advertisements are assigned many keywords that would match the text of the advertisement and that is an excellent method for getting searches to locate your product or service.

Alternatively, using the content network, your advertisement will be placed alongside an article with content relating to your advertisement. In this case it is read by users who may not necessarily be interested in actually purchasing any product or service, and, put another way, are browsers rather than searchers.

The effectiveness and performance of search advertisements far exceed that of contextual advertisements. In order to drive more traffic to your website, though, you could target both networks (in effect 'broadening your net') by selecting the search network check box for one and the content network check box for the other.

Contextual adverts have their advantages despite the fact that they may not give as many advantages as a search based advert. Your cost per hit is a lot lower and you'll have a little more flexibility in where your adverts land.

If you have an AdWords search advert created but yet want to try the content network you could consider starting up a different advertisement series pointed at the content market. Content networks have a more passive audience so simply just copying over your search network campaign will not suffice, you'll need to complete retool it to make it work.

In the final analysis a well run search network campaign is usually the most effective way to generate business but with a little ingenuity and well written copy there is no reason why this could not be supported by a parallel campaign on the content network.

About the Author:

No comments: