Open Source Content Management

This topic serves to explain and ask questions around Adwords.
What is it
How do you work with it
What do you need to do to make the best of it
Examples
Best practices

Come on you experts share it with us

Actually started a similar topic a little while ago, but not too many questions were asked.

www.mysmallbusiness.co.za/forum/internet...-adwords-ppc-account

Gosh - I didn't see the original forum post or I would have jumped in there
I think a couple of members most likely requested vouchers and then got a little stuck with using them.

I'll start off with answering Arjen's initial question :

What is Google Adwords?

Google Adwords is a pay-per-click online advertising service.

Where do you find these Google Ads?

When you visit www.google.com (or co.za) and search a keyword/phrase you will be offered a results page listing all the websites that relate to your query. They are ordered according to their relevancy and this ranking is determined by a Google algorithm. These results are called "organic" and are total free of charge. Now the "holy grail" of any website is to be listed on the first page (or within the top 10) of these results (simply because most people never actually go further than the 1st page.)

Businesses spend big money on their website SEO (search engine optimisation) to make this happen, but a top 10 ranking can never be guaranteed by any web developer (for a number of reasons.)

Google has therefore introduced a paid listing called Adwords which allows businesses to pay for the privilege of appearing on the 1st results page. These ads/listings appear on either the top (in a pink square) or right hand side of the results page under the heading "Ads". Your ads also appear on Google's display network (but that's a topic for another post.)

I hope that is a quick but clear intro into what Adwords essentially is. I'd be happy to pop by tomorrow and go into more detail about what pay-per-click advertising is and how to utilize it for your business.

Hope this helps and feel free to ask any questions you may have.

Google AdWords is Google's main advertising product and main source of revenue. Google's total advertising revenues were USD$28 billion in 2010.[2] AdWords offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, cost-per-thousand (CPM) advertising, and site-targeted advertising for text, banner, and rich-media ads. The AdWords program includes local, national, and international distribution. Google's text advertisements are short, consisting of one headline consisting of 25 characters and two additional text lines consisting of 35 characters each. Image ads can be one of several different Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) standard size.

Hope my explanation will work for you!