The Google paid ad display is the industry standard. An ad appears along the right side of the search results page or within content pages if content search is on. Recent changes in ranking parameters concentrate not just on bids, but also on the quality and relevance of your ad and the landing page associated with your ad (and indeed your entire website). This “Quality Score” concept has led to keywords becoming inactive for search plus reports of many huge jumps in keyword pricing.

Google Adwords is probably the most powerful and elegant advertising platform ever developed (no exaggeration). You can with a few clicks be showing ads to millions of people all over the world in 10 minutes. Or you can be narrow your focus on only display ads to specific sites in a 10 miles radius. They now incorporated other mediums like newspapers, TV, and radio too. The learning curve for it is probably a little steeper than most Google products, but it's still much easier than competing products like Microsoft Adcenter.