Google Adwords is Google's paid for advertising platform where an advertiser only pays when their ad is clicked on.

Being one of the largest paid marketing mediums on the internet businesses with a website can specifically target specific groups of people that are interested in a particular product or service. Advertisers can also refine their advertising geographically right down to a specific city region.

This makes it an excellent advertising medium. Literally, within 15 minutes of setting up your advertising campaign your ad will appear to thousands of internet searchers looking for your product or service.

Another excellent aspect of Google Adwords is that it allows you to calculate your roi (return on investment) so that you know exactly where your buyers are coming from.

You have the choice of your ads appearing on their search network or on other websites that complement your product or service or both.

The beauty of using Google Adwords is the instant potential to attract thousands of visitors to your website and the ability to track those visitors and their actions. This is more difficult to do in such a short space of time with offline advertising.

However, many people have wasted large budgets on their advertising campaigns because they have been poorly set up and not maintained. As a safeguard against this Google introduced their 'Advertising Professional' scheme so that businesses and individuals paying so-called 'adwords experts' to set up their campaigns could identify those that are indeed experts and have passed the criteria in order to be called one.

If your business does not have a website then you need to get one to take advantage of Google's huge advertising platform. If you already have a website then you should definitely include Google Adwords into your marketing arsenal.

In short, Google Adwords is direct marketing at its very best using specific keywords and phrases that target your product and/or service precisely. And once you start collecting the data about visitor behaviour you can keep refining your campaign to match the browser, the potential customer and the buyer.