AdWords

We recently started advertising OrigamiRisk with Google AdWords.  Nothing much, just an experiment to see how it drives traffic. If you aren’t familiar with AdWords, this is what puts a “sponsored link” next to your search results. The most fascinating thing about AdWords is the data. Google is great with data. And since you only pay if a user actually clicks on the ad, the costs are not much (and if you are paying a lot it’s because your ad is working).

You can create multiple text versions of your ad. Google will automatically detect which one is getting more clicks and show that one more often.

You can let you ad run and later Google will suggest other keywords that you might want to include in your ad. And Google will show you exactly how many searches you might get per month with that keyword. And how much competition there is to advertise.

The most fascinating part about it is the whole algorithm for how it works. Every time Google displays ads it is running a mini auction. Every advertiser has specified how much they will pay for a keyword ad. Or you can let Google optimize your bid to the auction (and your budget). Then with a combination of the auction price and what Google views as your “quality score” (Google doesn’t want to be serving up ads that aren’t relevant) your ad will get placed higher or lower depending.

I’m not sold on the “content network” though. You can advertise on Google search and you can include their “content network”. The content network includes web sites, blogs and gmail. But you have less control because Google is just trying to detect relevance. I recently turned off the content network because none of the sites really seemed relevant. We are in such a niche market.

And one of the best things you can track is a “conversion”. That means that the ad actually got someone to click where you want. So if we are trying to get people to sign up for a free demo, we can track if a user who clicked on our ad actually went to the demo page.

It’s quite fascinating, but again the best part is the data. I know how many times each of our ads was displayed for each keyword and how many times someone clicked on it. And based on the data I can modify the campaign on the fly.

Kind of fun actually…