The Marketing Tools Review

Adwords FAQ

What is Google Adwords?

Google Adwords is also sometimes referred to as pay-per-click (PPC) or cost-per-click (CPC) advertising. This simply means that once you have your ad showing, you only pay Google when someone clicks on your ad.

How much does it cost to run Google Adwords?

The minimum cost per click for Adwords is 5 cents. Of course, in more competitive markets your cost will be far greater than 5 cents. The maximum amount you can bid per click is US$50.

Where can I find Google Adwords?

There are two places where Google Adwords ads are displayed:

1. When you do a search on Google and if there sponsored links appearing on the right-hand side of your screen, those are Google Adwords ads. A maximum of 8 Adwords ads are shown on each search results page.

If none appear, that means no one has placed a bid on the search term that you entered. The ads appear based on your search term that you typed into the search box. For example, if you searched for "youth soccer", then the ads that appear are the ones that have bids for "youth soccer".

Adwords ads also appear in other search sites that syndicate Google's search results, for example, AOL, Earthlink, and Ask Jeeves.

2. The second place you will find Adwords ads appearing are on websites that contain Google advertising. That's the Google Adsense program. If you have your own website, you can apply to this program and put up Google Ads on your page. When someone clicks on one of those ads, you get a part of the payment for the click. So in essence the big difference between Adwords and Adsense is that Google gets all the money for the former and splits it with you in the latter.

How does Google determine my ad position?

Your ad position is determined according to a combination of your bid price and CTR.

What is CTR?

CTR stands for Click Through Ratio - that's the ratio of the number of actual clicks on your ad to the number of times the ad is shown (impressions). For example, if an ad is shown 1000 times and receives 100 clicks, the CTR is 100/1000 or 10%.

When you get to the section where you choose the countries, what is a good rule of thumb?

Think of the target market for your product. For example, if it's an ebook written in English, you'd want to target English-speaking countries such as U.S.A., Canada, U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, etc.

How does one know if a page has pop-ups? And how do we take care of that? Explain also, what is a "landing page" and how would you set that up?

A page has a pop-up if a new window (usually smaller in size than the main browser window) appears when you are viewing the website. Adwords does not allow you to direct visitors to sites that use pop-ups. One way of taking care of this is to create a "landing page".

A landing page is simply a one-page site where you can send the visitors before they click on to the actual product page. In order to set up a landing page, you would need to have a domain name and a hosting company to host the domain. It's not advisable to use the free webspace provided by your Internet service provider (ISP) for Adwords.

How does the "Filter Keywords" option work?

When you view an ad group within a campaign, this option is under the "Tools" section right below the date. Generally, you will only need to use this option when you have a large number of keywords. Then you will be able to isolate and view the keywords by stats, type, status, and the words they contain. For example, you may want to filter only the keywords that have a CTR less than 0.5%.

Back to Marketing Tools Review