What Are AdWords?

There is a lot of confusion amongst people new to the Internet as to exactly what AdWords are. This confusion is often compounded by the presence of another term in the online advertising world called AdSense.

In addition to stating exactly what AdWords are, explaining the difference between AdWords and AdSense is probably the easiest way to clear up this confusion.


What Are AdWords

AdWords are advertising campaigns that are set up through Google to drive highly targeted traffic to a blog or website. Google positions the ads on the websites or blogs of participating webmasters, including their own search results pages. Each time an ad is clicked Google get paid by the advertiser and share some of that revenue with the site owner where the advert was placed and clicked on. Unless of course it is their own site or search engine results pages; in which case they take all the revenue.

The reason most people run AdWord Campaigns is to bring highly targeted buying traffic to their site where they are being very specific about exactly what it is they are selling. So the main objective of an AdWords campaign is to bring people looking to purchase a specific product or service to a website that offers that specific product or service. The products or services could be offered as direct sales or perhaps through affiliate relationships but the crux of the technique is that it must cost less than the profit that can be made from the sales generated.

The biggest mistake anyone using AdWords can make is to offer a false promise. The reason being that each time their advert gets clicked they have to pay for the service, if the person then lands on their site to find that the product they wanted is not there, the most likely outcome is they will leave without making a purchase, consequently there will be a cost incurred for no reward.

The second biggest mistake is to be too vague, the whole point of an AdWords campaign is to be highly focused for your target audience so that you can bring people and products together that want to be together.

The AdWords advert is of a very limited size and number of characters, also some subjects/keywords cost much more to advertise than others. So there is a great deal of skill involved in selecting the keywords that will give you the most bang for your buck i.e. you want to attract visitors looking to make a purchase for the least cost.

Confusing AdWords with AdSense

AdSense is an advert that is displayed on a blog or website relevant to the subject of the site. Google place AdSense adverts on the site of participating webmasters which are generated by AdWord campaigns. If the ad gets clicked on the participating webmaster receives a small commission. The term for this is called Pay Per Click or PPC.

So you can see that AdWords are where advertisers promote their sites through PPC advertising and AdSense is where webmasters agree to host adverts in return for a small commission on a PPC basis i.e. no clicks equals no revenue.