AdWords is an advertising service by Google. It allows you to advertise your service or product on Google’s content network or search result pages. AdWords offers pay-per-click advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads. Their program includes local, national, and international distribution. Their text advertisements are short and consist of one title line, two content text lines and a display URL.

Wait a minute, where do those ads appear?

When you advertise on Google AdWords, you can choose to display your ads on either Google’s content network or Google’s search engine result pages, or both. The content network is made of various web publishers who display ads on their website through Google’s AdSense program.

Have a look at the bottom of this very web page. You will see an AdSense ad. Look for “Ads by Google” at the bottom right corner of the ad. If it’s not showing, hit F5 a few times to refresh this page, it should eventually appear.

On the other hand, you might prefer to advertise on Google’s search result page. This is where the ads will appear :

When you want to advertise your product or service through AdWords, you need to bid on keywords. For example, if you want to advertise a customer relationship software, you may want to bid on keywords like “crm software”, “customer relationship software”, “crm software comparison”, etc. If you chose to advertise on the content network, your ads will be displayed on what Google considers to be relevant websites. If you want to advertise on Google’s search result pages, your ads will appear when a visitor searches for a keyword you bid on.

That sounds easy!

But it’s not. You’ve probably got some competitors bidding on the same keywords as you. That will increase the price you have to pay for each click your ad receives and it will also affect the position of your ads. The higher you bid on keywords, the more your ads will be displayed. But the thing is, you don’t want to go into a bidding war ending up eating all your profit margin.

There are a lot of factors that affect your ad’s positioning and the price you pay per click such as how you grouped keywords together, the destination page’s PageRank, the relancy between your keywords and your ads, etc.

This is why it’s really important to play the game well: Google AdWords is a Formula 1 to success or… failure.

Stay tuned for Google AdWords for Dummies – Part 2.

TheWebmastersCafe.net has been redesigned! While there is still some work to do, the layout is completely done.

Let me know what you think!

Lately I got to a point where I was serving ads from various sources such as Google AdSense, Copeac, Commission Junction and a few others. I wanted these ads to share some common advertising spaces on my web pages so I wrote a little ad rotator. But then again it wasn’t perfect cause I needed to track clicks and impressions. So I decided to use Openads to handle the task and it worked like a charm. Openads allows you to deliver ads based on various criteria such as geotargeting, language, day of the week, etc.

Openads is a free adserver written in PHP and using a MySQL or PostgreSQL database. At this point, there are two versions available: 2.0 and 2.3 beta. You can get a comparison chart at http://www.openads.org/products/choosing-your-adserver-solution.html. The beta version offers a lot of additional features which I didn’t have time to experiment yet so that’s what we’re going to install today.

First of all, when I set up an ad server, I like to have a distinctive subdomain but this is optional. Also, I prefer using a distinctive database in order to be able to import, export or backup data for that particular application only. So for this tutorial, I suggest you start by creating an additional subdomain and a new MySQL or PostgreSQL database. I will not go into details about this; I’m assuming you know how to do it.

That being said, grab a copy of Openads 2.3 beta at http://www.openads.org/downloads. Unzip the content on your hard drive and upload it to your web server where you want Openads to be (i.e.: the newly created subdomain or a subdirectory of your main domain like http://www.mydomain.com/ads).

Next, use a web browser to visit the URL which contains Openads. Go through the setup wizard and fill the required fields. You may have to adjust permissions on some directories.

Now the last thing you have to do is to setup an automated maintenance task to run every hour through cron (Linux) or scheduled tasks (Windows) :

[path to php]/php -q [path to Openads]/scripts/maintenance/maintenance.php www.example.com

That’s about it for the installation.

Now I do not want to give access to advertisers nor publishers so I will act as both when managing the inventory. Stay tuned for my next post on how I proceed.