The rise of Google AdWords has been a phenomenon of the emerging acceptance by the advertising industry of online platforms for advert brokerage.
The way that it works is deceptively simple. The Google AdWords platform offers the possibility to bid against other advertisers to have a keyword phrase associated with an advert, and displayed on a third party site whenever that keyword phrase is matched with the site content.
The guarantee to the advertiser is that the Google AdWords system displays their advert to a receptive audience. The guarantee to the site owner is that they get to share in a little of the revenue generated by the click-through actions of site visitors.
In this way, advertisers can generate traffic to their web sites by making sure that their adverts are 100% in line with the keyword phrases, and that the right keyword phrases are targeted in their Google AdWords campaigns. In other words, it is up to them to work out how responsive visitors to a web site that matches the keyword phrase will be.
To help advertisers, the Google AdWords system has a built-in tool called the Keyword Planner which gives them these vital details. As a result of analysing various metrics, advertisers can try to make sure that they generate the maximum web traffic for the lowest possible price.
A side effect of this is that people who make light use of the Google AdWords system can also test markets.
In the first instance, a market can be evaluated using the tools provided, by simply looking at metrics such as search volume and cost per click. This helps to see where the value is in a niche: if a keyword phrase in the Google AdWords database has a high CPC associated with it, then that niche is likely to be responsive one, with money to spend.
Other market tests can be carried out by buying cheap adverts, and creating campaigns around them to sell products and measure the performance of the traffic generated by participating tin the Google AdWords programme.
As an advertising platform, Google AdWords provides access to a huge market at a low cost, however care must be taken to select the right keyword phrases, and make sure that a clear policy and strategy is in place to manage the campaigns.