Have you ever seen these little ads as you’ve been surfing round the internet?

You’ll also find them along the right-hand side and on top of the results when you use Google to search for something. Or on websites that choose to show them. Those are Adwords ads. Someone has paid to have that ad there to try and capture your attention and get you to click through to their website.

With approximately 200 million searches done every day and countless page views of websites that will have these ads on then I am sure you can see how powerful this can be in the right hands! (or a disaster in the wrong hands!).

So Google Adwords is just an PPC (pay per click) advertising platform that allows you to display a small advert to try and get people to click through to your site where you try to monetize them in some way (get them to perform some action that leads to an immediate or future purchase).

There are two main ways to use the system, you either choose the “search” function which will show your ads to the side of the search results Google gives when people are searching. You enter a “keyword” or “keyword phrase” into the system and then when people search for that keyword then your ad will appear.

Or you use placement targeting which means you get your ad to appear on someone’s website either by just telling Google to display your ad anywhere and it goes out and evaluates the writing on a page and sees if that page is a good fit to your advert. Or you can simply choose the websites you want your ad to appear on.