500 Startups Growth Handbook

Adwords is a form of Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising - about 90% of PPC ads are Google Adwords (yahoo and bing being a couple of others). It’s the text like ads you see on the top and right side when you google something. When your potential customers are “searching” for your problem/solution etc. getting your page organically ranked on the first page might take a while, but you could pay to show up in the ad spots and get their attention. You can also spend money with Google to show ads on their Display Network (GDN), YouTube, and Gmail

How?

Goal is to acquire customers at an affordable cost (CPA < LTV). Find and test as many keywords, copy, & landing pages as required to reach this goal. If there is established competition, this is challenging as your LTV is unknown/unproven and your CPA is driven up by competition. The number of customers you can acquire through adwords is limited by total number of searches for your keywords, and the price you’re willing to pay. This works for mobile app installs too, especially for Android.

Common mistakes founders make:

Using high volume and fairly competitive keywords
Not using negative keywords
Using poor and untested ad copy
Send the users who click on the ad to a poor landing page.

Related Keywords:

SEM, PPC, Paid Search, GDN, GSP, DSA, RLSA, Remarketing, Retargeting, CPC, CPM, bidding.