AdWords Advertising

AdWords advertising campaigns are built around short, carefully worded advertisements. Although they may be limited in size advertising of this type can be very successful in attracting the attention of potential customers who will follow the adverts through to your website.

Two methods exist and they depend on where you are going to place your advertisement. During the set up process of the AdWords campaign you will be given a couple of options and you can decide to place your ad on the search or content network (Adsense) or you can place it on both networks.

Search network advertisements are assigned many keywords that would match the text of the advertisement and that is an excellent method for getting searches to locate your product or service.

Alternatively, using the content network, your advertisement will be placed alongside an article with content relating to your advertisement. In this case it is read by users who may not necessarily be interested in actually purchasing any product or service, and, put another way, are browsers rather than searchers.

The effectiveness and performance of search advertisements far exceed that of contextual advertisements. In order to drive more traffic to your website, though, you could target both networks (in effect ‘broadening your net’) by selecting the search network check box for one and the content network check box for the other.

Contextual adverts have their advantages despite the fact that they may not give as many advantages as a search based advert. Your cost per hit is a lot lower and you’ll have a little more flexibility in where your adverts land.

Even if you have already done advertising with AdWords you may want to begin a new campaign if you want to target the content advertising folks. It may be possible to use the same campaign on the content network but it might not be as effective since the audience is usually considered more passive.

In summary, a well-run campaign on a search network will generally be the best and most reliable way to generate business. However, with some cleverness and savvy and well-written copy, it is certainly possible that this could be supported by a complementary campaign running on the content network.

Justin Harrison is a leading Internet Marketing consultant responsible for the Internet Marketing strategies behind some of the biggest online brands including Amazon, BBC, MasterCard and many others.