Marketing With AdWords: Pros and Cons

Google AdWords is a (pay per click) marketing tool that can help businesses and individuals promote their products and services. Whether you're looking to run a targeted local ad campaign or appeal to an international market, AdWords can be a powerful tool for driving traffic to your website and increasing sales.

The Importance of Keyword Research

Getting effective ads to display at the top and in the right-hand sidebar of Google search results requires knowledge of what your target market is searching for. Extensive keyword research helps keep you from wasting money on irrelevant ad placements. Make use of tools such as Google's AdWords Keyword Planner to discover words and phrases that people in your target market are searching for most frequently. You can also assess the competition and develop a list of related keywords that you might not have considered initially.

Keep in mind as you research that the main goal of an AdWords campaign is to drive traffic to your site and turn visitors into customers. The more specific you can be with your keywords, the better your ads will perform.

Pros and Cons of AdWords

Like any method for marketing online, AdWords has its pros and cons. It's important to weigh both before starting a paid ad campaign to determine if this is the right marketing method for your business.

Some pros include:

• Fast setup. Getting started with AdWords and running your first campaign doesn't take nearly as long as traditional SEO and optimization techniques.

• Extensive exposure. You can choose to target your ad campaign to a local, national or international audience depending on what market you want to attract.

• Budget-friendly. Setting an overall budget and a maximum cost-per-click gives you control over how much to spend on your ads.

On the other hand, there are a few cons:

• Character restriction. With only 25 characters for the headline, 35 for the URL and 35 for each of the two lines of text, it's challenging to design catchy ad copy.

• Paying for every click. Though you can set a budget for your campaign, you can't control the number of irrelevant clicks that your ads get. No matter how well you target your keywords, there will always be some people who click on the ad and discover that it wasn't what they wanted. These clicks come out of your budget and can drive up the cost of your campaign.

The Power of AdWords for Marketing

Marketing online with Google AdWords can result in powerful, targeted campaigns that drive large amounts of traffic to your site. When done correctly, the combination of keyword research and good copy should increase your sales and improve overall (pay per click) advertising performance. Taking the time to monitor how well each ad is doing allows you to tweak your campaigns to optimize for the top performing keywords. Make changes according to customer response and you should see a boost in relevant traffic as well as a more profitable marketing campaign overall.