AdWords: Google's PPC Program

[Chris]

Google's Adwords program is what generates those little boxes you see to the right of Google's search results. Currently Adwords are shown on AOL, EarthLink, AskJeeves, and of course Google.

Adwords work the same was as Overture in that you must bid for placement, however there is less competition so your overall bid does not need to be as high, and there is no minimum bid with Google. Additionally Google will spread your impressions out to fulfill whatever monthly budget you have over the course of the whole month. What this means is that even if there is someone who has bid higher than you they likely will not have their ad shown on every page view. In fact in my test campaign there were 5 competing listings and at least 90% of the time only 2 were shown, and sometimes mine was the only one. What this means is that you can bid low and still be listed highly occasionally.

Additionally, due to their placement, I feel that being listed below other paid listings isn't as bad as it is on Overture. If you're fourth on Overture you might end up at the bottom of the page or not on the page at all. If you're fourth on Google you'll still be there, on the side, and probably not the fourth ad to boot.

Unlike Overture, Google does charge a nominal $5 setup fee. Also unlike Overture your Adwords listings can be live the night you sign up. All in all Google runs a good all around PPC program.

It isn't perfect though. One issue is that you're drastically limited by the size of the back and must often be creative when trying to figure out how to write your ad copy with only a handful of characters of text at your disposal. Another issue is that they monitor performance and if your ads do not perform well they disable them - this can become annoying after awhile and expensive as well. Eventually they'll charge you $5 every time you enable a deactivated ad. One final problem is that Google will not allow you to advertise a site that has popups. On the surface this sounds fine but they don't care what the popup is. For instance I run a popup that is cookie controlled so that each user only sees it once, ever, and it advertises my newsletter. My Adwords listing was eventually disabled when a Google editor noticed this.

Original Source: http://www.websitepublisher.net/arti...ppc-programs/2

[incka]

Good review Chris.

At the moment the problem with adwords is not enough searches. There is more demand than supply and those not willing to pay $2-$10 a click hardly get and traffic from it. In the coming years we are going to see big competition for searches between the search giants as this becomes the case for all of them. I've only managed to get one campaign at $0.05 per click that has got over 1000 clicks a day.

[intelliot]

actually, I have seen Google working to provide greater supply for their adwords publishers in recent weeks. they have been really pushing their adsense program, which allows website owners to display adwords ads on their websites. this should grealy increase supply (albeit not actual searches)

for example, i received a book from google outlining 8 tips to increase CTR. my friend who is an adwords publisher received a letter outlining the benefits of adsense and encouraging them, as an adwords publisher, to sign up for adsense as well.

[incka]

And the picassa software contains the google toolbar, and they launched web search for publishers - But still there isn't enough.

[intelliot]

when gmail goes public that will increase the supply even further.

[incka]

I'm unsure, with all the people getting 100mb and 250mb on the others I don't think gmail will get as many people...

[intelliot]

the invites are still in demand. gmail is 1000mb -- still beats the 100 and 250'ers.

[Todd W]

I have been using AdWords almost as long as I have been using AdSense. AdWords requires a lot of testing and tweaking to work GREAT, luckily you can test with only .05 per-click and fine tune your keywords. I have used AdWords with success on different types of sites such as affiliate, ecommerce, and even sites where I don't sell anything.