iThnk.com

Advertising Conversations – An AdWords Experiment

Generally advertising and social media are regarded as separate entities. Social Media is about transparency, dialogue and building relationships; whereas advertising is merely interrupting your day to get a message across.  But things are changing.

It used to be quite foreign to see corporate URLs in ads, but nowadays you couldn’t call yourself a decent marketer if you didn’t promote your URL. Similarly, not so long ago it would have been considered shameful to part with any amount of coin to promote your blog.  However,  recently I’ve noticed people advertising their blogs on facebook, and some are even using Adwords.

This got me thinking, is social media going the same way as the URL? Are we going to see an explosion of twitter, facebook and myspace icons all over billboards?

I’m dubious as to whether you can actually draw people into a conversation through advertising, but I thought I’d put this trend to the test by taking advantage of the Google Business Stimulus Offer. Over the next couple of months I’m going to use the $75 free AdWords credit to see if we can boost iThnk.com’s readership. I’ll be looking at a number of things, total page views, time spent on the site, returning visitors and on site activities such as comments, diggs, retweets and sharing.

I set up the initial run of ads for this wee experiment two weeks ago and so far my limited exposure to Google AdWords has already taught me some valuable lessons. After reading that some companies will pay upwards of $60 U.S for a single click using keywords such as “car insurance”, I felt compelled to do share my thoughts on how NOT to spend that much.

Country music your thing? You like it so much you’ve started a blog about it? Well of course you’re so stoked on your blog you want to share it with everyone that may (or may not) be interested…you could run an AdWords campaign!  Watch out though, simple keywords like “country music” will could cost you $0.78 a click – and Google estimates you’ll expose your ads to almost 3 million searches. Ouch, that could be expensive. “Country music blog” will not have anywhere near the same amount of traffic but could sting you $1.20 a pop. Can you afford to fork out $1.20 every time someone clicks on your site? Remember there’s a reasonable chance they won’t like what they see. Money well spent?

So what do you do to get that wicked blog seen by interested peeps without needing to chuck the acoustic on ebay? Target your campaign locally, use local search terms, and get REAL value for money. “New Zealand country music blog” may not get millions of Garth Brooks fans to your site but those who do respond to your ad will definitely stick around a lot longer. At an estimated $0.09 a click it won’t take long busking outside New World to fund an awesome AdWords campaign.

Quick tips:  Keep an eye on what search terms are generating clicks and modify keywords accordingly, keep your daily limits at levels you are comfortable with, and use keywords in the ad text. Oh and don’t click on your own ads everyday to make sure they work!

I’ll be back with an update on our progress sometime in the near future. (Update here)