Why I'm Addicted to Google AdWords

I recently started an online advertising campaign for our first title, Play Golf Forever, using Google AdWords. For those of you that don’t know, Google AdWords are the advertisements that appear on the right-hand column of every Google Search results page (and on gmail, AOL, ask.com and many other pages). What has made this intriguing to me is the ad tracking website Google provides where you can see the results of all your advertisements – from the number of times each ad has appeared to the number of click-throughs that it has resulted in. I've found myself checking the results page for our advertisements every few hours, and modifying the ads, adding new search terms, and creating new ads nearly every time I go in.

It's become addictive – I now know the rush that those authors who've become addicted to their Amazon.com book rankings feel. There's something about being able to watch your results live -- a mix between fantasy baseball and televised election results, but with me in full command of the digital dashboard. I’ve seen the online advertising campaigns I’ve ran go from 30-40 impressions to over 1600 impressions a day, with the resulting clicks going up significantly. I’ll be the first to admit that I am far from an expert at this online advertising, but every time I check out stats I find myself reading two or three new postings on Google advertising tips and techniques. The ads that I have created lately are drawing significantly better results than my initial ads – and that is probably mostly because I've learned to hone the three 35-character lines of the ad. If nothing else, the Google AdWords advertisements make you learn to keep your message short and to the point.

Measuring the results of a traditional print advertising campaign is blurry at best and often dubious. How do you know who really paid attention to your advertisement? And how many impressions does it really take for an advertisement to stick with the consumer? There are plenty of case studies and focus groups that have been done that show typical results and typical consumer behavior, but on a limited marketing budget, that is an expensive unproven risk. What I like about the Google AdWords tracking is that I can see how many impressions were served up, how many people were motivated by the ad, which keywords resulted in the best interest, and then I can shoot to improve on that. Rarely does marketing or advertising allow these kinds of results (direct mail and phone campaigns come to mind).

I’ve yet to figure out what a good click-through rate is, or even whether all the statistics that Google has provided are really helpful, but I am determined to see my hits go up. Time will tell how many of those hits and click-throughs result in actual sales, but in the meantime, I know that my advertisements are getting visual impressions – and I will be checking those numbers and tweaking my advertisements every few hours.