Google Adwords is a paid advertising service available through the Google search engine. This type of advertising is called pay per click (PPC) because you only pay Google when someone clicks on your advertisement. When the visitor clicks, that visitor is taken to the landing page of your choice, usually a page on your website. These ads are shown at the top or on the right side of the Google results page (see the image below).

The way it works is the advertiser chooses keywords for which he wants the ad to show in the results. The advertiser also chooses the budget or the maximum cost per click he is willing to pay, and Google determines where the ad is displayed based on that cost per click bid. In general, the higher the maximum cost per click bid, the higher the ad will show, thus increasing the likelihood of getting customer clicks.

There are many benefits to this type of advertisement such as:

• Instant traffic and possibly instant revenue
• Ability to highly target geographically, thematically, by language, and more
• Cost effective and ability to control spend
• Instantaneous results / feedback
• Great for testing product names, pricing, landing pages and more with a small ad spend and good analytics