Google® Business Solutions All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter 1. Introducing Google Ads

In This Chapter

• Exploring what Google ads can offer you

• Defining an AdWords ad

• Understanding what makes a good AdWords ad

• Researching keywords

• Targeting your ads to your customers

Although we tend to forget it now, nearly ten years after its introduction, Google Search is a revolution in the use of the Web. But from its early days, Google, like other search engines, faced the question of how to make money from providing Web search.

Before Google came along, AltaVista was the search engine company that quickly rose to lead the market. It tried a controversial answer to the money-making dilemma: placing paid ads in with search results.

The introduction was rushed, and the paid ads came first — listed before the unpaid, organic search results. It's easy to forget that commerce of any kind had long been banned on the Internet, and even after the ban was lifted, many users frowned on paid ads. When "real" information was displaced by paid information, enough people complained to cause consternation, and the experiment was quickly killed.

Google always claims to put the customer first. So when it introduced paid ads a few years later, it was done more carefully. The first AdWords ads showed up only to the right of the organic search engine listings — so far to the right that, if you narrowed your browser window a bit, you didn't even see them. They were interesting rather than intrusive.

Google also worked very hard on the advertiser experience. It created a tool ...