Promise Media

A Google AdWords marketing campaign can be an inexpensive, efficient and highly educational way of driving targeted pay-per-click traffic to a Web site.

It can be inexpensive because there is only a $5 activation fee to open an account and no minimum monthly charge. It is educational because it will teach the active user a great deal about how people use the Internet to search.

AdWords is a tool that delivers contextual advertising on Google.com and its network of advertising partners, which includes AOL, Ask.com and YouTube. Contextual advertising means that an ad appears on a page when the ad is relevant to the content.

For example, someone goes to Google.com and enters “Paris weather” in the search box because she is planning to go to Paris, France for vacation next week and wants to know the weather forecast. The search results that appear will display the sites with the most relevance to “Paris weather.” But Google also will display advertisers who buy the keyword “Paris weather” above the search results and also to the right of them.

The advertisers who paid to sponsor the keyword “Paris weather” may have their own weather Web site to promote. If the searcher clicks on one of the text ads, that advertiser will pay for the click. If the search clicks on the basic search results from the Google index, the advertiser will pay nothing.

Let’s say the advertiser has established a monthly budget $10 to spend with Google and that the average cost per click for “Paris weather” is 20 cents. That means the advertiser will receive 50 visits per month (20 cents x 50 visits = $10) before the budget limit is reached.

That’s the inexpensive way of getting started with Google AdWords and a simple but entirely efficient way of promoting a Web site. You truly get what you pay for.

Go to Google.com and click on the Advertising link under the search box to sign up or learn more.