I have been using the same mobile phone for the past 5 years. Needless to say, its time I switch
to a new phone, this one will not let me even click pictures anymore. So, I went to an ecommerce
website. Browsed and browsed for hours. Almost reached a decision and then got confused among
a couple of models. Decided that I can decide among the two later and closed the browser. That
was two days ago and every time I have opened my browser after that, google has bombarded me
with advertisements of smartphones. Specially those two models. Lucrative offers to buy them
from different websites, offers of new phones in similar price range, and advertisements that look
like humble reminder of my purchase from the same ecommerce website. As of five minutes before
writing this article, I have ordered a new phone.
That is the power of Google AdWords. But what is it, and why should you care about it? I will
answer the second part before the first. It simple, because it uses your data, to advertise to you
and there is a good probability that directly or indirectly you might end up using it for your own
business or of your employer.
But what is it? “Adds by google” seen it somewhere? This is Google AdWords. AdWords is the
online advertising service which google has developed for organisations and individuals to
advertise on its various platforms. It is the largest source of revenues for Google :O. It is a paid
service where you pay Google to put up your advertisements on its different platforms like its iconic
search engine, YouTube and partner websites. Google used both your cookie data and the search
keywords of a user to rightly place the add for every individual. That’s a lot of Data Analytics in the
background. This makes AdWords a very attractive advertisement option for organisations as
AdWords makes it very easy for them to reach their target customers. They can decide on the
geography, search history context, current search results and even select IP addresses to correctly
place their advertisements to potential customers.
First the basics, there are four different type of advertisements:
