Google Adwords is a great place to generate leads. It allows an extremely large number of 'viewers' as compared to print, radio, or television advertising. It allows for almost unlimited amount of customizations and variations. With other 'traditional' type of advertising you can't really do 'variations' without paying a much higher price, and there's really no such thing as 'customization'. You can reduce your audience by going with a specific print magazine, or a local radio or tv ad, but then if you'd like to do two separate audiences for your various services, you'd be paying more fees. The cost of creating the ad alone would go up, weather or not it was a good decision to advertise that way. Essentially you lose the ability to test a 'wild' idea, or throw a little bit of money to test out a reaction to a new product.
With Google Adwords you have the ability to customize just about every aspect, how much you spend, where you advertise, and who your audience is. You can use variations of ads at no extra cost. You can have one ad for one particular audiance, another for a different group of people, and you can do this as much as you want. You will know exactly how many 'views' or 'impressions' you've had, how many of those 'impressions' were interested enough to click, then if you track it correctly, you'll know exactly how many of those clicks became sales. Essentially you'll know an exact ROI of your advertising.
For advertising with Google Adwords, the first thing you need to do, is obviously create an account with Google. Once you've got a Google Adwords account, follow these steps.
1. Define what you're advertising for, and how people would search for that. Be specific, these keywords are important. Have an idea of them, write them on paper, we will use them to define different ad campaigns.
2. Define your locations. Are you advertising locally? Regionally? Nationally? Write it down, and hash out how poeple would search for those locations. Local keywords can be used as well, local nicknames, metro area keywords, and others can be useful here.
3. Now that you know what your advertising for, who your advertising to, and where your advertising, we can start setting up your account. You will need to set up your ad campaigns. Do this by following Google's instructions, you will want one campaign per segment of your products. Obviously similar products can be in one campaign, while things like 'shoes' and 'hats' should be in different campaigns.
4. You will want to devide each campaign into 'ad groups' or keyword groups. Lets say your advertising for shoes, possible groups would be tennis shoes, designer shoes, dress shoes, etc.
5. Within each ad group, you can have many keywords. The keywords should be specific, generic keywords generally cost more and are less effective.
6. Create ad variations for each set of keywords. You can create multiple variations of ads to see what works best and test things out.
Tips
Test different ideas, modify your ads when you see a problem.
Watch your stats, you'll want your CTR (click through rate) to go up over time, but starting at below .05% is normal, it will take time.
Adjust your budget if needed, but just because Google says 'you are only receiving 30% of your potential doesn't mean you need to raise your budget.
Add and remove keywords. If a keyword NEVER gets you a click, stop wasting time with it, and use something else.
Use Google's tools and 'goals' to monitor your ROI, Google Adwords isnt for everyone, if its not worth it, be patient, but eventually you may need to just stop the bleeding.