It can be argued that Google AdWords is very cost effective and it’s most certainly a very popular technique for advertising online. The advertiser is able to show their ads to people searching for those exact products and services.

Google can easily control the ad budget of their advertisers because the advertiser will only pay when someone clicks on their ads. So in a sense, you only pay for the traffic you receive, which is a very fair way of doing things. The ads themselves are easily created and easily edited, it’s a very efficient process, and within minutes of creating the ad it can go live to Google’s entire user base.

So what are the advantages besides what we have already discussed?

Control is truly with the advertiser because the cost of advertising relies on a method called cost per click or CPC. You pay Google when you receive a click. How much do you pay per click becomes more interesting? In some ways that's up to you because you set your own limit. If your limit is well below the going bid rate then your ads will rarely show up so you’ll receive very few clicks and thus very few sales. If your ads are competitively priced you’ll receive more clicks and pay the going rate.

The daily budget is totally within your control and can be as low as 1 cent. You can also manage your ads in such a way that they are geo-targeted. This means targeted to specific countries or cities of your choosing.

You can see the actual performance of each of your ads by logging into your Google AdWords account and accessing your ad list. There you can set your ads for the times of your choosing by which day and or which hour you want it to run.

Available to the AdWords user is a comprehensive help center, which will assist in the functions of your account. After all, the profitability of Google AdWords comes from the users so Google goes out of their way to ensure everything is running as smoothly as possible.

How about the disadvantages?

As mentioned above, the help center is their for all users to read, but it’s not easy to be able to just simply start up a new AdWords campaign and voila! You are in profit. Google is notorious for being very unclear with their information to users and the AdWords program, and perhaps their sales suffer because of this, in some ways at least for the new user. You may have heard that some people have lost everything due to Google AdWords going wrong for them. I doubt that to be so, but it’s true that you can lose a fair bit of money if you don't know what you are doing. It’s much better to invest in a comprehensive guide or hire a company to setup it up for you then to simply rely on the AdWords help center.

Furthermore, and in conjunction with the above point, it’s not so easy to profit from Google AdWords. Again, you hear stories about people making a killing from it. There is absolutely no doubt that some people do very well with years of experience. But these are the people who have devoted many, many hours of testing and tracking. For an ordinary company trying to use Adwords for the first time, it’s best to get some direction.