Benefits of online advertising and AdWords

Understanding the value of online advertising

Online advertising allows you to show your ads to the people who are likely to be interested in your products and services, while filtering out folks who aren't. And you can track whether those people clicked your ads. Online advertising also gives you the opportunity to reach potential customers as they use multiple devices — desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones.

AdWords allows you to take advantage of the benefits of online advertising: show your ads to the right people, in the right place, and at the right time. AdWords offers several benefits, but here are the key ones:

1. Target your ads

Targeting gives you the ability to show your ads to reach people with specific interests — namely, people who are interested in your products and services — and show them relevant ads.

AdWords offers different ways of targeting, which we'll go over in more detail later. For now, here's a look at the choices that you have with online ads that can make your marketing campaigns even more targeted:

• Keywords: Words or phrases relevant to your products and service, which are used to show your ads when customers search for those terms or visit relevant websites.
• Ad location: Show your ads on Google search results pages and websites that are part of the Google Search and Display Networks.
• Age, location, and language: Choose the age, geographic location, and language of your customers.
• Days, times, and frequency: Show your ads during certain hours or days of the week, and determine how often your ads appear.
• Devices: Your ads can appear on all types of devices, and you can fine-tune which devices your ads appear on and when.

2. Control your costs

AdWords gives you control over how you spend your money. There’s no minimum. And you can choose how much you spend per month, per day, and per ad. You’ll only pay when someone clicks your ad.

3. Measure your success

With AdWords, if someone clicked your ad, you’ll know. If they clicked your ad and then did something valuable to your business -- purchased your product, downloaded your app, or phoned in an order -- you can track that, too.

By seeing which ads get clicks and which ones don’t, you’ll also quickly see where to invest in your campaign. That, in turn, can boost the return on your investment.

You can get other valuable data, including how much it costs you, on average, for advertising that leads to your customers’ online purchases or phone calls. And you can also use analytical tools to learn about your customer’s shopping habits -- how long, for instance, they tend to research your product before they buy.

4. Manage your campaigns

AdWords also offers you tools to easily manage and monitor accounts.

If you manage multiple AdWords accounts, a My Client Center (MCC) manager account is a powerful tool that could save you time. It lets you easily view and manage all of your AdWords accounts from a single location.

You can also manage your AdWords account offline with AdWords Editor, a free, downloadable desktop application that allows you to quickly and conveniently make changes to your account. With AdWords Editor, you can download your account information, edit your campaigns offline, and then upload your changes to AdWords. You can use AdWords editor to manage, edit, and view multiple accounts at the same time, copy or move items between ad groups and campaigns, and undo and redo multiple changes while editing campaigns.