Google Adwords

The book I read to research this post was Winning Results With Google Adwords by Andrew Goodman which is an excellent book which I bought from a secondhand bookshop. The name of the company Google started as a bit of a joke and comes from the word Googol which is a number that consists of a one followed by 100 noughts. In keeping with this the Google headquarters is called the Googleplex & a Googolplex is a number that consists of a one followed by a googol noughts & is widely regarded as the biggest number in existence. One thing Google exemplify is they work hard and play hard. Sergey Brin often plays street hockey and he is one of the owners of Google. Employees at Google frequently play sport together. Adwords has been quite a success story. Overture had a head start on Google but by late 2004 Google were way ahead in terms of businesses signed. The idea that you have a search engine that does your search but has a reserved space where companies can advertise and either pay per click or impression upto an agreed amount is a simple one but Google thought of it first. One problem in any search engine is what do you do with businesses that don't sign up. Google still displays them but pride of place goes to paying customers. Companies have to bid for the slots on Google Adwords and in addition Google has a network of sites they can advertise on like Blogger. Before using Google Adwords you should know how much you are paying per customer ie if you run an advert for $420 and you get 10 customers you are getting 1 customer per $42 dollars spent. Don't forget not everyone who clicks on your advert will necessarily buy it for a variety of reasons ie they might be a competitors. You can however analyse your data and can report any inconsistencies to Google. Google has purchased Ouverture which made a high end web analytics platform so it looks like they'll incorporate that into Google Web Analytics. A final mention is Google often launch betas of products you can try at http://labs.google.com This is called Google Labs and is worth checking out.