The Adwords Experiment: Week 2

This week on the Adwords Experiment the bid on each keyword has been kicked up to 2 cents per click.  There was some additional tweeking which many help the ads come up in keyword searches.  These tweek's were necessary and should have been done before the experiment started.

Remember before you start an Adwords campaign, make sure that your ads actually contain the keywords they target.  Google uses relevancy and bid amount to determine if your ads come up in searches.  Apparently they wont let just anyone bid on any keyword with an unrelated ad.  To make sure your ad actually comes up, polish the ads to be meaningful and contain the keyswords relevant to your site.  For this reason the 'shot gun' approach is most likely not a successful one.

Fortunately Google lets you have multiple ads per campaign.  Which gives you an opportunity to create ads which target those keywords.  This has been a classic example of learning how to run before learning how to walk.  The experiment may be in trouble simply because time hasn't been spent perfecting the ads.  But on the bright side it won't cost anything to keep going...  So the experiment can be rerun at a later date.

For Week 3 the keywords and ads are narrowing down into 'Ad Groups'.  There will be six ad groups each with between 1 and 3 ads.  They will end up having 3-4 keywords each.  You can save yourself a lot of time and effort by setting this up ahead of time.  For me this is a fun experiment, so the trial and error approach is fine.  But if you are doing this for real money, at a real company, make the Ad Groups ahead of time.  You know you are doing it right when Google starts suggesting additional keywords to go with your ads.  For me that took till the first day of week 3.  If you group well it should happen almost immediately.

There isn't much reason to post pictures of the graphs...  They look exactly the same.  Same number of clicks, same cost.  But the impressions are rising.  So people have been seeing the ads.

This week was pretty much the same as the first week. Which is disappointing, although informative.  It means that the amount that you bid is not the only relevent factor in using Adwords.  I'm preparing something really special for you guys based on what I'm learning.  Anyone who wants to run a good Adwords Campaign is going to want to take a look.  Check back with Week 3.