Branding

If your advertising goal is branding, your main reason for advertising online is to raise awareness and visibility of your product, service, or cause. To achieve this, you'll want to aim to place your ads in front of as many people as possible within your target audience.

Use cases

Although just about anyone could use online advertising for any reason, here are some of the best use cases:

•An online retailer without a physical store location:

Use online advertising to drive traffic to your website.

Show ads both in response to relevant keywords on search engines and on Display Network webpages that your target customers would be likely to visit.

•A small business that cannot afford expensive, traditional advertising methods:

Use online advertising to narrowly target your ads to a particular audience, and to closely control your costs and track your return on investment (ROI).

•A large business that would like to build brand awareness:

Show image ads or multimedia ads on Display Network webpages that your target audience is likely to spend time on.

About Google and Google AdWords

Introduction to Google and Google AdWords

As a search engine, Google gathers and organizes a multitude of information from the Internet, then makes this information available to users throughout the world who are searching online.

Users can visit the Google homepage or other Google properties, enter a search query (terms related to information they'd like to find) into the search field, and click "Google Search." Google returns a variety of search results -- including lists of files, articles, documents, and websites -- that are all highly relevant to the query. (If a user clicks "I'm Feeling Lucky," the user goes directly to the first website or document in the Google search results.) Users can also search for results within Google Images, News, and other specialized Google services.

Search results appear on the left side of the page. Google doesn't accept payment to place websites or documents in search results. However, advertisers can purchase Google AdWords ads, which appear on the right side of the page, and sometimes above the search results.

Google AdWords is Google's advertising program. AdWords lets you create simple, effective ads and display them to people who are already searching online for information related to your business.