Posted in Web Marketing on December 10th, 2007 by Andrei Oghina
After feeling the sweet taste of the first visitors coming to my site, I started playing a little with Google AdWords. I made an account and created a “Starter Campaign”, with a budget of about 2 euros per day.
My first idea (which proved to be wrong) was to use as keywords band names and movie titles. I’ve done a little SEO in order to optimize my website for these keywords, like making the page title of each result being the search term itself (if you where searching for “Queen”, the page title would have been “Queen”). I’ve done this because I knew Google will assign me a quality score for each keyword, that is influenced by the landing-page relevancy, so the more relevant that page is for that particular keyword, the better the quality score, the less the amount I have to pay per click.
Then I made a list of popular band names and movie titles and added them as keywords on AdWords. Also, I set up the landing page of each of these keywords to be the result page for that particular item. So, the idea was the following: the user searches on Google for “Green Day”. My campaign has “Green Day” as a key phrase, and, hoping not too many other campaigns have this key phrase, my add will eventually trigger. The user clicks on my add (that states: Title: Meet Emmy ^.^ Description: Tell me your kind of music. I will suggest you other bands to explore.) and lands on my site with the Green Day search already performed and seeing the results (other similar/related bands), and everybody is happy.
Although it all worked fine for the first couple of days, soon enough I started to see how Google is increasing the cost-per-click for the majority of my keywords until they’ve got to a whopping 4 EUR/click and became “Inactive for search”. Why that happened became clear to me eventually, but I will describe that in a later post dedicated to my second Google AdWords campaign.
Note: This post has been written in retrospect and posted on September 10th, 2008.
