Google gives its employees $1/day of free adwords advertising. Beyond an employee perk, this gives Google’s employees the experience of being an Internet advertiser, i.e. experiencing the point of view of Google’s paying customers. I have been using my $1/day account to advertise the divorce-consulting business of my sister in law (In Hebrew) and did indeed find this experience to be quite illuminating.
The first thing I learned is that the ad auction itself is just a small part of the whole thing. Choosing the right text for the ads (all ten words of it), choosing the right keywords to target, etc, is much more prominent than setting the right bids. “Tiny” issues come up everywhere, e.g. when I needed to choose keywords to target, it turns out that there are four ways to write divorce in Hebrew: גירושים, גירושין, גרושין, גרושים. I’m not really sure whether these are all “kosher” spellings, but they are all searched for an do need to be taken into account. Even more, the whole advertising campaign is peripheral, in principle, to the business itself, and frankly the auction logic is not the first concern of the advertiser. This is obvious, of course, but is easy to forget for one whose work focuses on the auction logic.
Now for the auction itself: all together I spent several hours setting up the campaign, making up the ads, choosing keywords, looking at reports, and trying a bit of optimization. The adwords user interface was very easy and convenient to start with, but it didn’t take long until I was attempting things that confused me (e.g. splitting my single campaign into two different ones), at which point I gave up, and stayed with what I achieved, which is quite fine actually. I was especially impressed with Google’s automatic suggestions of keywords which were cleverer than what I came up with (I know that not really, just some learning algorithm, but they were eerily good.)
I was surprised and disappointed (as an advertiser, but frankly delighted as a Google employee) by the pretty high prices on the keywords that I targeted: my average cost per click is 88 cents, and this is for pretty low slots, on the average. (Divorce is expensive, it seems, also on the Internet.) This means that my $1 per day suffices for a single click per day, and no more. I do get this single click almost every day, but have so far been unable to ever get two clicks in one day: neither optimizing by hand, nor letting Google’s automatic bidder do it. I was professionally insulted by not being able to beat the automatic bidder, but have still not given up on getting an average of more than one click per day for my $1. My click through rate is pretty high (compared to my expectations): 0.79%, so I usually get about 150 impressions every day of which one is clicked and results in a visit to the website. Now these visitors are probably really good leads: not only have they searched for relevant keywords, but they also clicked on a pretty specific ad. I suppose that if even 1% of them become clients (this is not so little: we are not talking about buying a sweatshirt; this is about handling divorce), then the advertising would be considered quite profitable even had my sister in law paid for it. Unfortunately, it is quite hard to gauge whether this is the case: getting and keeping the required statistics is easier to imagine theoretically than to do when you have to handle a small business. In other words, I haven’t a clue what my valuation of a click is. (The lack of knowledge of one own’s valuation has been discussed in AGT, but frankly I have not seen really convincing treatment of this issue.)
The set of reports about the performance of the campaign that adwords makes available is quite impressive, and they are really nicely and simply done, but somehow I still don’t really know how how to optimize my campaign as to get the most and the best customers to the site. I’m sure that more time on my part, as well as a more data-centric handling of my sister-in-law’s business would improve things, but the difficulty of getting and handling the right data is another lesson that I got from this exercise (again, I knew this theoretically, but now I feel it too).
It is pretty easy to track conversion using adwords, they give you to the tool. Just put in the proper javascript on your contact submission form and you’ll know how many of those leads convert to a contact. You’ll have to track actually winning the work manually from there though. I bet your conversion is lower than 1% though.
Thank you for your comment. I agree with you.
Optimization Center (the “Optimization” tab) on the AdWords interface is working on issues like finding good bids, good keywords, good bids for those keywords, et cetera.
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Thanks for sharing this post. It gives me a fresh look at my Google Adwords campaign. I am targeting folks that are interesting in personalized social advertising (victusmedia.com). We’ve had some luck, but need to work more on developing fun user tools with the data we generate.
Best of luck to your sister in law!
You see only half of the battle. Multiply your spend by a thousand. Now run your campaign until several ugly CLICK FRAUD problems crop up. Now try to get help from Google.
Good luck.
Dig 7 pages deep for help. Find out that help is outsourced in India, working from a knowledge base. Find out these folks know less than you and cannot help you. 30 days later get a weird letter from Google ROBOT suspending you because of CLICK FRAUD caused by GOOGLE.
Try every channel to find a live human at Google. Find said live human. Exchange 37 emails until said live human decides to call you. Be told your problem will be solved. 68 days later hear back from Google ROBOT that your problem has been resolved.
Login. Problem still unresolved. Close your account. Pray for a refund.
380 days later, receive letter asking you for feedback on the support.
No refund. No help. No fix.
That my friend is what its like for a small business feet held to fire by the automaton that is Google Adwords.
Now I use Twitter.
1. ZERO CLICK FRAUD
2. I KNOW EVERY PERSON WHO BUYS FROM ME
3. I HAVE REAL CONVERSATIONS WITH GREAT PEOPLE
4. MY TRAFFIC IS 15 FOLD OVER THE GOOGLE ADWORDS BS
5. My COST IS ZERO
6. I SPEND LESS TIME IN TWITTER THAN I DID IN ADWORDS
7. I DO NOT HAVE TO DEAL WITH INDIA CUSTOMER SUPPORT
8. ITS FREE!
9. DID I MENTION ITS FREE?
10. DID YOU KNOW TWITTER IS FREE
I am so thankful for Twitter. Google should be quaking in its boots, social media marketing is going to take a lot of business from Adwords as more people learn how to use it.
And folks you can rest assured that at some point when you really get good with ADWORDS your going to figure out that a hefty percentage of that traffic is flat out fraudulent.
Unfortunately you wont see that easily on a dollar a day….
You might try other related items that get people into divorce maybe “adultry”, “cheat on my wife”, “orgies”, “multiple-partners”… then try keywords that someone who is considering divorce would be actively searching on like “how much is spousal support”, “child custody”, “father’s rights”, and things. All of this would hit the right target market.
I’m afraid that these keywords don’t really fit the rather touchy-feely tone of her consulting service…
Google gives $1 adwords daily as perks to employees? Does that artificially drive up the bid cost of keywords for real advertisers?
That doesn’t push up the bids for most people I wouldn’t think. Especially not for competitive keywords (all over $1/click)
Noam,
Can you please reply to John’s concerns. It sounds rather frightening.
Thank you,
Guy
This is an academic blog, in which I post from my personal perspective on things that seem of interest to the algorithmic game theory community. Obviously, this post was my own personal experience and in no way am I representing Google here. I am sure that there are other forums on the Internet that are more appropriate for discussing John’s case.
[…] My $1/day Adwords Account Google gives its employees $1/day of free adwords advertising. Beyond an employee perk, this gives Google’s […] […]
hmmm very good money:)
What a great idea, and it really makes sense to do this. You really need to work on getting your CTR up though 🙂
Can I budget 1$ a day for my site @
http://www.Javaprince.com?
Thanks for sharing this post. It gives me a fresh look at my Google Adwords campaign. I am targeting folks that are interesting in personalized social advertising (victusmedia.com). We’ve had some luck, but need to work more on developing fun user tools with the data we generate.
Best of luck to your sister in law!
Noam,
Can you please reply to John’s concerns. It sounds rather frightening.
Thank you,
thanks
google tutorial
[…] to this blog post Google gives their employees $1 a day to advertise on Google. The intent is to give employees […]
Well, the divorce market is a pretty expensive market for your 1/day of free adwords advertising.
Ernie Bland
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divorce-consulting business of my sister in law
Very interesting, looking to set up adwords for our site wwww.fancy-dress-sales.co.uk
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This is serious, does it mean AdWords cost that much? .88 dollars per a single click?
How do you get lower priced clicks targeted at third world traffic?
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