The 3 Components of Internet Advertising (Part 2 of 3)

Internet Advertisements

Although Internet advertisements can encompass a wide range of advertising options, this article covers the most predominant one—Google AdWords.

Google Adwords allows you to create and run ads for your business, quickly and simply. It offers pay-per-click advertising (PPC) and site-target advertising and allows users to easily track the performance of various ad campaigns. PPC is exactly what you’d expect—advertisers specify the words that should trigger their ads and the maximum amount they will pay per click. When a user searches Google’s search engine, ads for relevant words are shown as “sponsored links” on the right side of the screen, and sometimes above the main search results.

With site-targeted advertising, advertisers can enter keywords, domain names, topics, and demographic targeting preferences, and Google places the ads on what they see as relevant sites within their content network. If domain names are targeted, Google also provides a list of related sites for placement.

Once you’ve decided on your budget and keywords, Google will consider all the bids for that keyword and the Website’s quality score to determine which bidder will “win” the keyword. On the downside, some of the more general and popular keyword phrases have a set minimum bid which makes some phrases unobtainable for many marketers. It’s just too expensive given the type of sales transaction that results from clicks on that phrase. The word “free” can sometimes be very expensive on Google AdWords.

AdWords can produce strong results for businesses by putting their advertisements in front of targeted audiences more likely to be interested in your product and services. On the other hand, it can be a very expensive tactic with a high probability of click fraud. Meaning, there are estimates that 20% of all click-throughs are fraudulent, so with PPC advertising you can expect 20% of your budget disappearing.