AdWords
AdWords is Google's branded text-based pay-per-click (PPC)
advertising service.
A Google promotional graphic, highlighting AdWords
What is AdWords?
Advertisements are short, consisting of one title line and two content
text lines. Advertisers specify the words that should trigger their ads and
the maximum amount they are willing to pay per click. When a user searches
Google's search engine on www.google.com,
ads for relevant words are shown as "sponsored link" on the right side of
the screen, and sometimes above the main search results. The ordering of the
paid listings depends on other advertisers' bids (thus the system is
classified as P4P) and the historical click-through rates of all ads shown
for a given search.
All AdWords ads are eligible to be shown on www.google.com. Advertisers also
have the option of enabling their ads to show on Google's partner networks.
The "search network" includes AOL search, Ask Jeeves, and Netscape. Like
www.google.com, these search engines show
AdWords ads in response to user searches.
The "content network" shows AdWords ads on sites that are not
search engines. Google automatically
determines the subject of the pages and displays ads for which the
advertiser has specified an interest in that subject. The ads show in boxes
resembling banner ads, with the designation "Ads By Gooooooooooogle." These
content network sites are those that use AdSense,
the other side of the Google advertising model.
AdWords is used by publishers who wish to bring traffic to their websites.
The biggest competitors are Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) and
MSN's soon-to-be-launched adCenter.
Most of Google's revenue comes from AdWords.
Legal context
The service has generated lawsuits in the area of trademark law and click
fraud.
Interacting with Adwords
The ads are displayed on the right hand side of the natural
search results. The ads are pure text, and
thus difficult to block. However, on external sites, they are hosted within
an IFRAME (an HTML element), making them easy to remove with advertisement
blockers like the Mozilla Firefox extension Adblock.
Technology
The AdWords system was initially implemented on top of the free MySQL
database engine. After the system had been launched, management decided to
use a commercial database instead. As a result, the system became much
slower, and eventually it was returned to MySQL.
See also
External links
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