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What is Google Adwords?

I generally recommend new web businesses (particularly small sites) to consider using Google's pay per click Adwords service in the first instance to generate exposure. These are the ads that appear on the right hand side of Google's search results pages.

There are a number of steps required to set up a successful campaign but briefly, you specify a daily maximum budget and then assign a maximum cost per click (CPC) to each of the search terms you want your ad displayed against. You can have a number of campaigns or ad groups each with their own highly targeted search terms.

You can pause your campaign, change the budget and CPC and so on so you are in complete control. Needless to say, writing a good ad is crucial to catch people's eye.

The minimum CPC for many search terms is 1p but it is wise to experiment with higher amounts to see where your ad is ranked. As your click through rate (CTR) improves, ie the number of clicks you get per impressions, the amount you pay per click reduces.

So for example if your ad is shown 100 times and 10 of those impressions generate clicks then your CTR is 10%. If you specified a maximum CPC of 10p, as your CTR improved you would find that your CPC might only be 5p or lower.

The more specific your search terms the lower the CPC needed. ie my own campaign includes the terms web design Leeds, web design London, website design Leeds etc. Adding negative keywords to your search terms means that your ad will not displayed for irrelevant terms.

Using my own example, I have negative words of books, templates, courses etc so that my ad is not displayed if people search for web design books or web design templates but is displayed for web design companies.

Your ads are shown throughout the day until the number of clicks meets your daily budget - however it's not exact as the amount is calculated over the month so you may find that on some days it may exceed the daily maximum where other days it has not met the specified amount. To begin with, it's often best to start with a high daily maximum and monitor your ad groups closely to see what happens.

Yahoo has a similar service called Overture.