Google Ads

Formerly called Google Adsense, now just known as Google Ads is where you can bid for ad space on the web.

There are two main type of ads:

  1. Text ads are ads that show on Google search result page.
  2. Display ads are ads that appear on the google ad network which is composed of million of pages.

For Text ads you can choose what searched keywords you want to be shown in. Each keyword has a different price range based on popularity and demand, but you don’t pay ahead of time. Instead, you’ll have to set a max bid amount, basically the amount you’re willing to pay for one (1) click. Typically the highest bidders will be placed on the top of the search results page. The cool thing is that you only get charged if a user actually clicks on the ad! This is known as Cost Per Click (CPC). To avoid over spending, you can set a max budget per day, which Google will try to stay within.

You can fine tune the ads to only show up for certain geographical areas and during certain times. Or even on certain devices. There’s a lot of flexibility.

Setting up a keyword campaign is simple. You choose a keyword which you can designate using the following matches:

You can also use Negative keywords, to say which words you don’t want to be used to show your ad. It’s like an exclusion.

You can create split variations to determine which of the variations converts users the most. You can keep fine tuning.

There’s a tool provided by Google called Keyword Planner where you can see how often are the keywords searched for and also the bidding range.