Google AdWords : Java Glossary

The advertiser side of AdSense is called AdWords. Advertisers pay for clicks on ads, (not sales or impressions/views). It is an unusually effective form of advertising because it cleverly places ads on pages closely related to what you are selling. If you were selling bee keeping equipment, Google would only place your ads on people’s webpages that had something to do with bees. Further, you don’t pay anything just to display your ad, only when the viewer shows interest by clicking it and being directed to your website. You pay whether he buys something or not. You as an advertiser optionally may choose which websites and pages your ads appear on. This feature is called placement. You can use that to advertise on pages of mindprod.com.

Advertisers bid for the right to ad placements for important keywords and sites. Law firms will bid up to per click for keywords that may land them clients. Website owners displaying the ads get a undisclosed share of this largess. Google has to bar website owners who lard their sites with phony false popular keywords. When the bids are too low, Google displays public service ads. Advertisers can submit a daily advertising budget to Google and be pretty well guaranteed they can’t go over it.

Here are the approximate fees:

Google insists you give them your credit card number or bank account so they could potentially withdraw unlimited amounts. I would have far preferred a gas tank I could fill with PayPal periodically so I am not signing up for unlimited liability. For each campaign you can specify a daily budget, but not an overall budget or time limit. It is thus possible to rack up huge bills if you don’t pay attention to all your campaigns. They offered me $100 worth of ads free but I turned down the offer when I discovered the catch.

• to sign up 
• You can chose a maximum cost per click in the range  to  .
• Your daily click budget can be as low as .
• Site targeted ads require a minimum price of  per thousand impressions.

In the simplest case you set up a daily budget and a set of keywords relevant to you product and bid how much you are willing to pay per click on each keyword. If you bid too low, your ad will rarely be seen. The trick is to pick specific keywords that will bring in the customers that other advertisers have not thought of and bid up the cost. You can also limit your ads to a certain geographical radius for local businesses.

You need to compose some ads, which can be a simple as a couple of lines of text, or as elaborate as you can make a gif, png or jpg banner.

Advertisers can also target specific websites or pages to display their ads in a process called placement targeting. Both AdWords and AdSense users can set up placements. For example, if you had a web page that you would think would be a great place for a pariticular sort of ad, you could set up a placement for advertisers to request. If you want to advertise of the mindprod.com website, that is how you would go about it. It is a complicated system. You are best do so a fair bit of reading on how it works before you start playing with real money.

AdWords Sign up