Google Adwords - The Internet Marketing Revolution

The Google adwords advertising product has changed the face of Internet marketing, and has become a necessity in any Internet marketers toolbox.  Any serious online marketing campaign will include adwords as one aspect of promotion among many others.  Adwords is Google's main source of revenue and generates money through a pay-per-click type system.  It is a breakthrough in marketing mainly because it allows for highly targeted advertising to be included in relevant search and web pages.  The adwords program is run through local, national and international levels of distribution, with advertisers having control with regards to the context and the location of the markets their ads will be shown in. 

Google adwords began in the year 2000, surely a good year to be starting such a revolutionary new product.  In 2003 the product was expanded to include site targeted advertising methods. These methods placed ads not only on pages run by Google, but also allowed other publishers to generate income through placing ads in relevant pages.  Since then it has grown to such an extent that a Google advertisement is now common place both on Google search engine pages and in other content pages all over the Internet. 

Adwords ads are placed on the appropriate pages based on either content or searches, and these two terms classify the two different Google network components;  the adwords search network and the adwords content network.  In the search network an ad is targeted to a user's specific search inquiries.  Whereas in the content network an ad is placed based on a certain theme or subject matter rather than a specific search term.  Now that we know how these ads are placed, we can begin to understand exactly how it is that they generate revenue.

Adwords works through an advertising system called pay-per-click, where advertisers only pay when a user clicks on an the advertisement and visits the page.  This is a brand new way of advertising as companies only have to pay for ads that have already in some way made an impression on a user.  There are many different pay-per-click advertising schemes out there, however Google's adwords is the biggest and most known. 

The ordering of the ads on a web page is dependent on the advertisers bids for a certain keyword term or subject matter along with a general 'quality score' that is given to an advertiser by Google.  This score will take into account an advertisers page originality, account history and other details probably only known by Google.  The reason that Adwords and pay-per-click in general are so revolutionary is because they allow advertisers to run completely targeted advertising campaigns.

Because advertisers can pick their own keywords and contexts, adwords can place ads in the exact and appropriate page for a particular product.  Google does this through what it calls contextual targeting technology, where Google finds matches for ads through linguistic processing algorithms.  Google adwords is a valuable way to run search engine marketing campaigns, and since its introduction has seen brand new avenues of advertising revenue being generated by business all over the world.