A Guide to Affiliate Marketing in Australia

Adwords is a text based advertisement program that is designed by Google for those people, who run their businesses online. The idea behind Google Adwords is to allow webmasters to create ads to promote their online business and have these ads placed in the most lucrative places on the web. Google places these ads for you, in an advertising network.

The best thing about Google Adwords is that webmasters can choose their own set of keyword phrases to match their business. This helps draw more targeted audience to click on your ads and to checkout the landing pages of your ads, thereby improving the conversion rates of your advertisement. Another great thing about Google Adwords is that unlike the conventional advertisement systems (wherein you need to make a payment to display your ads), you need to pay only when a prospective customer clicks on your ad. As a result of this cost per click plan, webmasters are able to cut down on their advertising costs.

With Adwords, Google places your ads either within the Google result pages or on some websites that are linked up with Google. It is very lucrative to have ads placed in the search pages as the ads are exposed to a highly targeted audience. When a user searches for some information on the Google search engine, then along with the search results, Google also displays advertisements that are most relevant and closely related to the keywords that are mentioned in the search string. These ads would obviously interest the users as they are related and relevant to the information they have been looking for on the web.

Apart from search results pages, Google also publishes your ads on the relevant websites (Google network). For example, if your ads talk about protein supplements, Google would have these ads published on the websites that talk about health, supplements, and other relevant topics.

It is entirely your choice to select the spots where you want to display your ads. You also have a choice to select the desired format of your ads. In fact, there are a number of formats available for advertisements that include images, text, and videos. Google also provides you with regular updates and reports about the performance of your ads in your Google accounts.

You get charged as and when any user clicks on your ad. The charges vary depending on the ads and the bidding for keyword phrases. You will have to pay an activation fee to get started.

Some of the highlights of Google Adwords are listed below:

1. You can directly reach the interested people rather than waste time with the people not interested in your product or service. There is a better chance of increasing your conversion rate with the interested people.
2. You can decide your ad budget and plan accordingly. Google gives you complete control over your ad budget.
3. You can customise your ads at any time you like. You can also switch between the different formats of the ads made available to you.
4. Your ads get shown up immediately after you have created them.
5. Because Google is the most desired search engine today, there are more and more people visiting your ad links.

To top it, Google also provides you with excellent customer care. They provide an online help center which answers most of the queries. There is a good set of FAQ’s there and other detailed information. You can also email them and they would reply back in a couple of days.

The overall success of your online business depends on you as an affiliate as well. You must include the right kind of keywords in your ads. Also, the links can only take the user to your website. It is then up to you and your website to convert the visitors into your customers. This makes it important for you to have your website well organised and well managed.

Pay Per Click (PPC) is a very good way of driving traffic to your site within a short period. Google Adwords in my opinion is the best PPC platform around although you may also like to try out Overture which runs the Yahoo and Live Search Engines.

With PPC advertising the cost is determined by your budget. You can set your daily spend as high or low as you wish and you can also choose the maximum price you would like to pay for each click.

To get started with Google Adwords you will need to setup an account with Google. This will require you to enter a Credit Card with a $10 setup fee applicable to your new account.

Once your account has been setup you will need to setup your advertising campaign. One of the most important things you need to do is keyword research!

Choose your keywords carefully as you don’t want to be paying for customers not necessarily looking for your products. Google offers a brilliant tool to help out with keyword demand here.

Once your keywords have been selected check on all of them over the next few days, then weekly just to see how each is performing and then make any changes you see fit (remove keywords, add, increase CPC etc).

The other important thing you need to be cafeful with is your Advertisement and its keywords and wording. If you create an advertisement that doesn’t include keywords or is not relevent to the page you are redirecting your website to, Google may see the advertisement as low quality and penalise you on your “Quality Score“.