Google Ad Words is the name of the pay per click advertising program which allows affiliates, and other merchants, to advertise on Google and other sites in the Google network.

The program works by setting up a system in which the advertiser pays every time a visitor clicks on his ads.

Since the advertiser can select his bid amount, he is in effect controlling the amount of money he is spending to bring those visitors to his site.

You might wonder why every merchant doesn’t simply bid the minimum amount so that they can keep their ad costs to a minimum.

Since the ads are shown in order of the highest bids first the advertiser with the highest bid will generally receive the most traffic.

Affiliates can utilize the Google Ad Words program to advertise their affiliate sites.

For this to work the affiliate would need to know how many visitors he needs to bring to the merchants site to obtain a sale.

He must then divide his commission by the number of visitors and he will know his breakeven point.

The affiliate would then want to bid below this amount for his traffic.

So if 100 visitors will produce a sale for the affiliate, and that sale produces a $25 commission, then the affiliate needs to spend under .25 per visitor to be profitable.

There are other pay per click search engines which affiliates can use to promote their affiliate sales.

Yahoo has recently started a similar program which can allow advertisers to promote their affiliate links by bidding for key words.

To make sure that the affiliate stays ahead of the game he needs to monitor the results of his advertising.