[lug] Adwords

[George Sexton]

It's pretty easy to identify the source of a paid referral. You can 
specify a URL paramter. I.E. ?source=XXXX to identify the ad that sent 
the traffic. You can then look for referrals with that string as part of 
the URL and you know it's a paid ad. I've gotten into making it 
?source=xxxxxxx&ad=y to make it even easier to sort through ads 
regardless of the source.

Personally (and I spend a LOT on google ads every month), we don't do 
much site targeted ads. The conversion rate is just horrible. The only 
way it make sense is if you can get the ads for a VERY small amount. You 
can target your ads to be run only on specific vendors, so that may be a 
good way to go to get the exposure you want.

We pay extensively for search ads. It's more expensive ($0.20-$1.25) or 
so for our key words, but the conversion rate is much better.

Really, that's what you have to measure. Either use Google Analytics, or 
come up with your own method of determining conversions. If you use 
broad match, you might be amazed. "HTML Calendar" broad matches to 
"Australian Calendar". So, you need to carefully monitor what search 
phrases are generating hits, and what the conversion rates are. If a 
particular search phrase generates a lot of hits, but not conversions 
(download, signups, etc) then you're pouring money down a hole. You can 
limit this via exact matching and phrase matching. Also, use negative 
key words. We have a negative keyword "free" on our ad so that if you 
search for "free web calendar" our ad doesn't run.

Google adwords is really it's own whole thing. I thought I knew a lot, 
and after I went to an all-day seminar sponsored by Google, I realized 
how little I really knew.

Lately, I've been spending a lot of time optimizing our ads to generate 
higher click through rates. One of the weird voodoo things about adwords 
is the higher your click-through rate, the less you have to pay for 
clicks. Because of the length limitations, writing ads is really hard. 
Sometimes, the strangest things can make a difference. We have two 
identical ads:

Online Web Calendar
Need an easy, fast web calendar?
Interactive. Powerful. Anywhere!

Online Web Calendar
Need an easy, fast web calendar?
Interactive. Powerful. Anywhere.

The only difference is the exclamation point. The ad with the 
exclamation point does .2% better for Click through rate.

I recommend brainstorming a lot of ads, and looking at the rates to find 
out what works. You need someone to help you, hopefully someone creative...

karl horlen wrote:
> This is not a direct linux question but I thought some in the group might have some practical experience / advice with adwords.
> 
> I'm trying to evaluate Adwords before diving in and spending the money on it.  

My recommendation is to dive in with a small budget, and carefully 
monitor your results. You can spend gobs of money really fast depending 
upon what you're doing. OTOH, I set up an ad for a local funeral home 
that gets hits for $0.30 or so. It's the bargain of the century for 
them, because these little cheap ads generate a huge return if they get 
a customer.

> 
> For those that have used it, does goog make statistics possible that identify which sites, site page uri your ads eventually show up on?  I'm pretty sure it gives you number of page impressions but I'm more concerned about location and "where" the ads actually show up than "if & when" an impression occurs.  The former is more useful.

I haven't used Geo-targeting for ads other than to restrict our ad to 
running in the US and other English speaking countries.

> 
> When someone clicks on a goog ad placed in a site via adsense versus on a search page, does goog track the site referral for you and make it ez to see the click through referral stats?  If not, is it ez to grep the http logs for a specific query string that ids the request as coming from adsense placed ad?

I wrote my own programs to do analysis. I look at conversion, average # 
pages, average time on site. I also look at conversion for search 
phrases, and for ads in total.

> 
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-- 
George Sexton
MH Software, Inc.
Voice: +1 303 438 9585
URL:   http://www.mhsoftware.com/