I’ve written before about Google’s Adsense, now I’ve heard about Google’s Adwords. And how you have to be careful with other forms of advertising.... Uber techie of course was the source of this wisdom. His article broke it down really nicely, however I still have no idea what a campaign or what Adwords are for that matter.

In a small nut shell, Adwords is not something a newbie like me is going to even attempt. If you have a tame webmaster or webdeveloper who has done this before, then dabble in Adwords. Otherwise stick to other ideas for making money online thingies (one of my all time favourite technical words: thingies), as this really is for webmasters, however I wanted to understand what it is and thought you might like to too. So here goes:

Adwords is a pay per click programme that amongst other things displays adverts on your website or blog. Not much difference here. The difference is that in Adsense you are saying to Google that you are happy to place their contextual adverts on your articles or blog and when your readers click on these adverts, Google pays you a predetermined but unknown amount .In Adwords you are writing ads that others are placing on their websites and paying people to click on them. So how does this make you money? And why is Richard determined to dabble in it? I’ll get to that a little later. First, let’s understand the phrases.

Squidoo has a ‘lens’ (what they call their articles) with the Adwords terminology which I found useful.

Ads are self explanatory even for me. Those little thingies on your site that you want people to click on. In the Adwords sense, they are the things you write that will be displayed contextually on other people’s websites.

An Adgroup is a variety of chosen ads that will display in a rotation (along with keeping your content fresh and updated, your ads shouldn’t stagnate either) when the keywords that relate to the ad is typed in. Keywords... here’s that word again. I covered it in Adsense and Search Engine Optimisation.

A campaign (here we get to the lingo Richard is using) is a bunch of Adgroups, that you will run. This gets monitored so that you can see which campaign is the best way to make money, and which needs to be scrapped.

Now to making money.

You pay Google to advertise through Adwords. It’s like placing an advert in any media. Your money comes back at you from qualified customers who have come to your site and made a purchase or from sending qualified buyers to affiliate websites who then pay you commission for sending people their way.

It is almost guaranteed that you are going to lose money, in dollars, daily, at the beginning while you figure it out. It is not easy, quick, simple or cheap. My advice: leave it to those with a technological clue. Like Richard. And follow his story on this very site as he dabbles his way through Adwords.

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