Reach people when they are actively looking for information about your products and services online, and send targeted visitors directly to what you are offering. AdWords is Google's flagship advertising product. AdWords offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads it's easy to control costs—and you only pay when people click on your ad. The AdWords program includes local, national, and international distribution. Google's text advertisements are short, consisting of one title line and two content text lines. Image ads can be one of several different standard sizes.

Google Search Result Page - Ad Placement

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 a "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 and the "quality score" of all ads shown for a given search. The quality score is calculated by historical click-through rates and the relevance of an advertiser's ad text, keyword, and landing page to the search, as determined by Google. The quality score is also used by Google to set the minimum bids for an advertiser's keywords

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.com, 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. Click through rates on the content network are typically much lower than those on the search network and are therefore ignored when calculating an advertiser's quality score.