PCWorld: Google states that it eschews pop-up advertising and traditional banner ads. Google doesn’t accept paid placement in its search index, and the interface seems free of commercial ties. How do you make money?
Answer: text-based ads based on keywords. The entire system is automated (Google doesn’t do anything that can’t be automated — that’s one of the keys to their success). I bought $50 of ads for my book a few weeks back. I don’t make any money off my book, I was just curious to see how this much-heralded system worked. You can set up multiple ads per campaign, there are strict limits on the number of characters, and they have excellent reporting to show you exactly how effective each ad has been. I bought the phrase “free Python tutorial”, a relevant search term that got several hundred hits a week but does not, for some reason, show my book in the search results (probably because I don’t use the word “tutorial” in my text, and Google ignores META keywords). My clickthrough rate for the life of the campaign was almost 4%.
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