the ten reasons you should use google adwords for internet marketing

Google Adwords is the market leader in internet marketing. It is an online service that can be used by pretty much anybody to market and advertise their product or service using Google's extensive search and display network. It can reach a large number of internet users around the world.

There are several benefits in using Google Adwords, some of which are shared by other services as well. I will try to detail ten top benefits of Google Adwords here. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish features from benefits, and benefits itself can be pretty subjective depending on what your requirements and needs are.

There are several alternatives to Google Adwords, such as Bing, Facebook, Twitter, Adroll, BuySellAds etc among many others. We will look at some of benefits of using Google Adwords. It is not meant to be a comparative study of different advertising platforms. You can find some of the features of Adwords in the other networks as well.

Budget Flexibility and Affordability

Google Adwords allows you to segment and section your marketing into several different campaigns and ad groups. You can then allocate a daily budget to each of these campaign separately. This allows you to fine tune the entire cost of advertising with out the fear of overspending. The different campaigns thus allows you still allocate a higher amount to certain campaigns that you deem more valuable. The daily budget can be as low as 1 cent or as high as you like.

In addition to these total daily amounts you can specify, you can also specify the CPC or Cost per Click on a per keyword basis. This allows you to target better converting keywords as opposed to low traffic, low converting and less important keywords.

Potential Reach

Google Adwords provides the maximum coverage among all marketing providers, as far as I know. It touts itself to cover about 80% of all internet users across its various networks. The coverage includes both the search and the display networks.

Search and Display Network

Adwords covers two different sets of advertising networks: Search Network and Display Network, each of which can be targeted using the Adwords service.

The Search network covers the search engine result pages as well as websites that use Google search technology to provide custom search and ads. The Display Network is a set of content websites that use the Google Adsense, such as this one to display Ads. A wide variety and large number of websites implement Google Adsense in order to monetize the content.

Target Specific Audience

Another benefit of Google Adwords is the ability to target very specific demographics, based on a very varied and large number of parameters. You can segment and target your users based location, gender, age, device, time of day etc among many others.

You can also target specific websites that you want to. In addition to that you can target websites in the Display network by using contextual keywords.

Detailed Analytic Data

Google provides you with a detailed report on your marketing efforts. You can also integrate the Adwords data into the Google Analytics, if you have one. It is probably another of benefits of Google Adwords that is easily better than most other networks.

The detailed reports gives you the opportunity to fine tune and optimize your marketing strategy over time. You can find your best performing keywords, the best performing locations and demographics among others.

Preference for Quality Ads

Adwords gives preference to the quality and performance of the ad over the bid amount. This is denoted by the quality score of the ad and keywords. This actually ensures that even the advertisers with low bids and budget can perform well, provided the quality of ads and keywords are good.

This makes sure that advertisers with large budgets cannot completely out-bid you every single time. Obviously, the higher bid and larger budget do have effect in the process and tend to win more often, but it tries to create a much more even playing field.

Ad Formats and Sizes

Google has a large variety of Ad formats and sizes. It also supports custom ad sizes. You can also use different technologies such Flash and HTML to create display ads. Flash is probably getting phased out anyway.

Another feature is the ability to add site links to your ads. This could potentially increase the CTR of the ads.

Speed

Google with its enormous networking infrastructure is still the fastest ad serving platform, especially when you take into consideration the bidding and contextual mapping features of the Adword service. The is probably one of the best benefits of Google Adwords.

Many ad framework generate only a limited number of ads or have one static ad which is then displayed for every page view. This is especially true in affiliate marketing. Google Adwords can display ads dynamically as you change and modify your ad preferences and the turn around time is pretty good. You can potentially being showing your newly created ads within hours.

PPC (Pay per Click)

You pay for only the ads that was clicked on. This is known as Pay per Click which is actually available with most other services as well. So, it is not quite unique with Adwords. But it is quite useful to make sure that you are not spending money on users who are not interested or are not your target audience, especially if you are on a low budget.

The other popular method is CPM, where you pay per number of impressions of the ad.

Control

Yet another benefit of Google Adwords is that you always have full control over when and where your ads are shown. You can pause or remove ads at any time. This allows you to limit and control your Adword budget, in addition to the daily budget settings. Adwords usually also have good responsive time for changes.

It is quite possible that some of the above points are more of a feature than a benefit. Also, you can get some or most of these features in other products and service as well. Probably the biggest advantages of Google Adwords are the extensive network and Google's dominance in the Search Network, then combined with the extensive feature list. The exact benefits of Google Adwords will ultimately depend on your own requirements.