Google Advert trial

This post summarises learnings from a free trial for Google Adwords. I'm experimenting with it to generate traffic for this blog. It's been an interesting learning experience.

I subscribe to Information Age, an computer-related technology magazine. In a recent mailing, I also received a marketing flyer from Google, featuring a company called Wriggly wrigglers - you may also have seen it if you're in the UK.

The freebie part was a £30 voucher, so I thought I'd have a go. The time limit is the end of June '08, so thought I should get cracking.

I've gone some fairly idiosyncratic posts on here, e.g.: Locked In syndrome, Mobile Cranes, choosing adverts, Psychology experiments. I thought they be a good way of reaching a specific audience. Besides, these are things I'm interested in.

So lessons learned so far:

• I've done a general ad and two specific ones (Zimbardo & Milgram, Locked In syndrome)
• When you sign up, you start with Starter edition
• This is probably only good for setting up your account
• Otherwise, Starter edition, you want Standard - no price difference apparently - this is the comparison
• With the Starter edition, you can run variations of the same ad, but I wanted to run ads on different keywords, so you *have* to upgrade to get this functionality.
• You can choose "bundles" of Countries
• Basically, I've chosen English-speaking countries from around the World, with some Scandinavian ones (and Spain, I like Spain)
• I've got it running for a month, although need to check regularly - you have to give them a way of payment (they want to wean you and hope you forget you're paying)
• The "cost per click" is supposedly optimised by Google - but quite a lot of my keywords seemed not to be active because of 1p minimum Google has chosen
• It's one Campaign - multiple ad groups (i.e. ads for different posts
• The usability is actually pretty good, decent tools
• A fat pipe would be nice, saves lag between pages when you're setting everything up (although you can download software to do things offline)
• Demographics
• You can target 10 year cohorts (e.g. 0-17 years)
• Site and Category Exclusion
• You can choose to be excluded from various sites / pages, e.g. "Death & Tragedy"
• Also certain page types - e.g. Parked domains
• There was a £5 "Activation fee", so I've only got £25 to spend
• There seems to be a daily cap on spending
• "I already have a Google Analytics account. Please link it to this AdWords account"
• Nice, already have the Analytics code on my blog, I can link automatically to it, and Google joins it all up. :-D

One other thing - I've linked to my original "Diving Bell & the Butterfly" post, so I've updated that to give links to posts 2 & 3...

I'll report back about how I get on!