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Why Google Uses AdWords

It probably comes as no surprise that we are huge fans of AdWords. It is such an effective marketing tool for our advertisers that it's no wonder that we'd use it ourselves. In fact, Google uses AdWords for many of the same reasons that our advertisers do - it's a great way to reach users and raise awareness about a product or feature. Type “Chrome” into the search box on Google, and you’ll see an ad with links and a demonstration video.



House ads are a common industry practice. Newspapers show ads in their pages with information on how to subscribe. Television stations show ads to promote different programs that are on the same channel or other channels owned by the same parent company. And search engines commonly use ads to inform and educate users about services they provide.

As we’ve always said, we’ve been using house ads for several years to promote a variety of products. We've run search marketing campaigns on Google for search products such as iGoogle, Google Maps, and mobile products as well as for specific issues in order to provide information to our users. We’ve run ads related to disasters to help users find resources and learn more about disaster relief (for example, in the aftermath of the earthquake in Chile, Google showed an ad with links to Google’s crisis response website for queries such as “Chile earthquake”).



How do these house ads work?
  • These advertising campaigns are subject to internal marketing budgets, so we are strategic and careful in our implementation of our advertising campaigns.
  • We only allow ads from Google that comply with the same ads policies that apply to any other advertiser. In fact, Google's ads are not guaranteed to appear in any given spot.
  • Indeed, as any other advertiser experiences, only directly relevant and quality ads will show, as the auction is dynamic [see Quality Scores and Ad Auctions].
  • It is the quality scores and the bids of all advertisers entering a specific auction which may determine the cost-per-click, and Google may well be one of these advertisers.
  • For AdSense ads, all AdSense publishers and syndication partners get paid exactly the same way whether the advertiser is Google or another business.
We manage our advertising campaigns according to the same principles that any other advertiser would. We look closely at our budgets, managing our spend against CPC and CPA (cost-per-acquisition). Like more than a million other businesses, we believe in the value of online marketing to connect with web users.

Posted by Lorraine Twohill, Vice President, Global Marketing