Google AdWords innovative pay per click advertising engine is one of the best and most useful tools currently available. Although not the only program offering this service, it is by far the best simply because it reaches so many people. By advertising with AdWords, you have access to the 100 million Google users that use their search engine. By levering Adsense as well you are getting access to millions more targeted visitors. Another key is that Google rewards you with more clicks for less as you write better and more optimised ads! More on this later...

Getting Started

It costs $5 to sign up and get started with AdWords. Once you've signed up, you need to select your keywords. This step is very important as it will be these keywords that will launch your ads. Select keywords that target your product or service. Make sure you do some research before you start entering in your keywords to ensure that people are using these search terms to look for your product. The more popular the keyword, the more Google charges for each click. To help keep track of the performance of your ad campaigns it is useful to manage the selected keywords in multiple AdGroups and this will also help you to use ad text specific to each keyword.

Your next step is to decide where to target your ads. You can choose to have your ads only appearing on Google's search page and their network of partner sites. When people perform a search that is related to your keywords, your ad will appear either on top or on the right hand side bar. You can also choose to have your ads appear on Google's Adsense network. These are web site publishers who have allowed Google to display ads within the content of their web sites. You must also select which geographic locations you would like your ad to appear. If you are selling a service that is only useful in the UK then you don't want to be wasting money by paying for clicks from US users! Again, it can be useful to create AdGroups or campaigns for each individual country if you are selling world wide.

Setting and Managing Your Budget

When you first get started I would recommend starting on a low budget by keeping your daily limits low. Doing this will allow you to track and analyse the keywords you are using to ensure they are cost effective without losing too much money. Once you have a positive ROI on a keyword then you can start to increase your ad spend. If a keyword is performing badly, change it or get rid of it and try some others.

Creating your Ad Text

The key to success is to make your ad stand out. Describe what you offer and how it can benefit them. Include your keywords in the title whenever possible. Although it creates more work for you, try and create an ad for each keyword your using. Another great tip is to capitalise the first letter of every word you use, in both the title and the text. In your text, try and use action words that tell them what to expect when they click and what benefits are in store for them. Your aim is to improve the overall quality score of your ads. This score determines where you appear in the list of ads. A high quality score and you'll be near the top, even if you're not paying the highest CPC rate. A low score and you'll be near the bottom where it is hard to get clicks.

Conversion Tracking

Once your ads are up and running it is important to track where your conversions are coming from. You can review where sales and leads are coming from and manage the campaigns based on these results. A cost per conversions value will be displayed within your reports that can help you to decide where to bid more or less and which keywords and ads you need to optimise further. It also allows you to compare your cost per conversion rate with other non-AdWords campaigns you may be running.

I hope this gives you a little bit of an idea about how to get started using Google AdWords. It is a very powerful tool that can really explode your sales. It is however, hard to master and I advise you to continually test, tweak and improve.