Google AdWords

Pros

Adwords is an excellent tool for advertisers of all types in almost all industries. Their customer support is stellar (at least for a business) and their new interface makes it even easier to use and manage. Provided you have your tracking set up in Google Analytics it's easy to jump in and get started and quickly see what is/ isn't working while optimizing your content for the conversions you want.

Cons

Adwords is not something you can set up and then walk away. In order to get a return, there does need to be someone that monitors the campaigns and looks and what is and isn't working as poor performing campaigns can quickly run away with your budget in a blink of an eye.

Pros

I run an agency where our bread and butter is doing AdWords search campaigns for clients. Managing AdWords has literally provided a career and livelihood for me... it’s also given time the ability to generate tens of thousands of leads and well over $10 million dollars in revenue for my clients. Over the years the platform has evolved a lot and in its current iteration it’s more user friendly than ever and I enjoy using it a lot.

Cons

The recommendations system doesn’t always give good recommendations for example it will recommend running responsive search ads for basically every ad group but it’s been VERY rare in my experience that responsive search ads have outperformed revalue ads for our clients... worse yet the recommendations system punishes you for dismissing recommendations (including mediocre ones). Also customer support can be pretty awful at times. Minor issues overall.

Pros

None that I see
I thought this would help bring relevant traffic to my website but it didn't it was a complete waste of money.

Cons

Google ads has really wasted my money. My ads were for sale of condos and yeah Google was bringing up my ads when people were looking for rentals? Even when I used exact phrase searches. Almost $1,000 wasted.

Pros

AdWordsTool totally serves my will by promoting my site to people who searching for my products on google search, it's very sophisticated to give people what they want to see, and google ads really nailed it!
You can filter the least potential buyers with the addition of negative keywords, and by using a keyword planning tool you can find the best words for your products to promote.

Cons

The ads can make you spend a lot of money, especially if you are not optimizing the ads and they are not profitable for you, so it is always important to pay attention and check if they "delivering the goods".

Pros

I use AdWords on a local level (local meaning a handful of zip codes across two counties) and it has helped me raise awareness for my brand and services as well as attract new clients. Local does the same but takes more time and effort whereas AdWords gives me a much faster turnaround time. I like that I can set budgets and monitor campaigns in real-time so I know if my campaigns are cost-effective. I feel that I have 100% control over my campaign design and budgeting so I am not concerned of spending too much. If after a certain threshold, new customer acquisition is still too low, then I know to either stop the campaign temporarily or to more likely investigate why and modify my keywords or ad messages.

Cons

To run an effective local campaign, it is critical to know your target audience but even more critical to conduct elaborate keyword research. This can be very time consuming, even tedious and repetitive at times. However, this is the time investment necessary to ensure you have quality campaigns that will actually be profitable. If you do not have a background in PPC advertising or general knowledge in digital marketing, AdWords is not simple to dive right in (or at least not simple to do it right). Take the time to do ample research and even consider the training and certification offered by Google. I felt this was more fit for someone whose line of work is PPC as opposed to running your own ads for your business so I have not completed these. I am certain they would be exponentially beneficial to anyone, but I feel confident my keyword research and message design was enough to at least turn profits from the time and money spent using AdWords.