AdWords

The keyword tool is very helpful to uncover data relevant to your ad campaigns. You can search one or several keywords and return data to learn how much it will cost you per click for a particular keyword. Google Adwords uses an auction based system which is most helpful if you have the advertising budget to win optimal placement of your ads which is typically on the top of each page searched. You can pay in a couple of other ways actually though I've not done like per impression, or per conversion on your website. I've setup PPC account for clients using Adwords and it was seamless. The reporting provided once the campaign is running is decent, but can be much more powerful when utilized in sync with Google Analytics; their enterprise level analytics reporting program which is freely available and well worth the time to sign up for and integrate with your Adwords PPC campaign. You can create ads with your phone number in it which is great when synced to a call tracking platform so you can measure data about calls made from specific tracking numbers to learn which ads are working best. The targeting possible with Adwords is very good. You can drill down to target demographics and various other aspects of your market audience. It's all hosted online with data stored and backed up by Google. I like that you can run ads in different ways to suit different businesses. I've used it successfully with offline, local businesses to gather targeted leads and phone calls. The ads are all responsive and adapt to any computer, laptop, smartphone or any other mobile device so that's sweet.

Targeting isn't as robust as Facebook. I find Facebook targeting to be the best because of the ability to target intent, education level and whether they already make purchases online. I also find Adwords to be more expensive per click than Facebook. The ROI and lifetime value of your customer would help determine whether it's worth the cost per click. Google makes changes to a lot of their software and they get better which is great. But unless you follow the platform news or their RSS feed closely they don't provide the best communication with their users about this. After all, we are on their email list and they have the means of sharing this with us, or could at least give us the option to do so with some frequency. Unless I've missed this somehow while signing up for many various Google accounts over the years. There is a lot of functionality when creating ads and a newbie to PPC advertising would probably be slightly overwhelmed. The advertising world has it's own terminology and this together with the options possible for your campaign could make it a frustrating experience. I would recommend taking a course first, or hiring an expert to setup your first campaign from which you could observe how everything is setup and learn why it's best for your situation. It could get very expensive if you are not split testing and optimizing your campaigns for lowest cost and best performance.

Adwords is a search engine marketing tool and Google's pay per click advertising platform which I've used a lot to direct targeted traffic to my own offers as well as my client businesses. The platform isn't overly flexible in term of configuring your account dashboard, but it has everything you need and then some to get targeted traffic to your offer. To include Adwords in any integrated, split tested ad campaign with a solid sales funnel in place is beneficial if you have a significant ad budget and competence in the PPC world. I recommend it.