Google Adwords & How It Works

In this article I shall be outlining the basics of Google Adwords for all you beginners. Google Adwords is Google’s own advertising service in which you can place search results for your website on a SERP (search engine results page) by bidding and paying for them.

Google Adwords is designed for those who do not wish to wait for their new site to organically work its way up the search rankings of their chosen results page. Immediate results can be seen through using paid search and is in no way as confusing and difficult as you probably imagine it to be right now.

So what is Paid Search? Paid Search is the term we use for advertisement among the listings of a search engine. The top of a search engine results page is where these normally appear, or to the side, and gradually look more and more like organically searched results. You may have noticed that Google places a small yellow or green ‘Ad’ label on to the left of their paid searches. As well as Google, Yahoo & Bing combined run their own advertising network called the ‘Yahoo Bing Network’. But for the moment, let’s just concentrate on Google Adwords…..

What are the basic principles of Google Adwords? In a nutshell, keywords are chosen that a searcher might use on Google, and then an advert will be created to appear on the search engine results page based on those keywords. Now, as you can imagine you’re probably not going to be the only company or individual wanting to produce adverts to people who use your particular items. Competitors can bid for the same keyword search term, often causing the top of a search results page to have multiple paid adverts. If you do want your ad to appear at all at any stage, you must bid against marketing competitors on how much you’re prepared to pay Google Adwords every time your advert receives a click. Clearly, the more you pay per click the more of a chance you’ll have for your ad to appear in a search results page. But, and this is a big but, it is not just the highest bid that is taken into account. Google uses something called a ‘quality score’.

Google identifies how appropriate and relevant the advert is to the searcher and the search terms they’ve used. Google’s quality score also looks at how many clicks your ad has previously had, this is abbreviated as a CTR score (click through rate). For example if the searcher types in ‘Adidas originals’ and your ad appears saying ‘Adidas originals here’, once the ad has been clicked on, this must lead directly to a page featuring Adidas original trainers. It is not good enough if the advert directs the user straight to your homepage. The higher your quality score the better. Even if your maximum bid is lower than a rival bidder, you may still appear above their ad if you have a superior quality score.

So, as you know, you pay Google every time your ad is clicked. The maximum price you’re prepared to pay or each click is called cost per click (CPC). You choose the maximum bid amount, even though Google can choose the bid amount for you within your budget, if you choose the automatic option. This theoretically brings you the most clicks possible within that budget.