AdSense and AdWords Synergy

I just received a postcard from Google AdSense. Actually made money! $31.37

Our internet marketing class participate in the GOMC and received $200. It seems that in May AdSense on that site (and maybe some blogs) made about $25 back.

So it seems that if you put AdSense on the websites you run AdWords accounts on actually will give you back about 10% or some fraction of the money you spend on AdWords.

Experimenting with Google AdWords

After receiving $150 in coupons from Google Adwords I decided to run a campaign today. It was easier than I thought to set up the initial campaign. My website is www.welldash.com, a website for wellness awareness and applications.

I chose the pages that I wanted to focus on as the landing pages.

1. wellness
2. depression
3. qigong
4. support groups
5. sleep

I wrote up my ads and selected the keywords. My campaign is called "Building Awareness." One mistake I made was to lump the Ads in one campaign and not divide them up in to groups. To fix this I went back to the home tab of Adwords and clicked on campaign. I divided the ads into 5 groups with appropriate AdWords for each.

I have started at $5 a day with <$0.60 CPC.

I set the landing page of each ad in the ad itself. Initially I had set everything to go to the index page but I went back and set the ads and keywords to go to the invidual 5 pages listed above.

Up to now the qigong page is the best performing page at 1% CTR.

Week 3 GOMC Team Formation & What Search Is

Marketing Sharpshooters Team Formation
This week we formed our teams for the Google Online Marketing Challenge. Our team name is Marketing Sharpshooters. We completed the following tasks:

• Selected the business.
• Got agreement from the business that it was ok to use their website.
• Sent an email confirming the team.
• Created a Google AdWords account.
  

The part that confused me was the statement that any campaigns created should be paused. Since we had not started any campaigns I assume they did not need to be paused. The help menu on Google AdWord explained how to pause a campaign.

We registered our team and entered our customer ID into the GOMC page. Now we wait for the $200 in AdWords.

Search
We discussed how searches are made in class this week. After you create a business website it is important to list in a directory. This helps the search to find what industry you are in. DMOZ is an open directory and the first place to index your page.

How Search Reads Your Site: Lynx, Browser for the Blind
One item that was of interest was the Lynx browser for the blind. Lynx only reads text and simulates which a search engine will see when it looks at your site. Since search engines look for words this is very helpful. I found it more user friendly to use a Lynx viewer. at the bottom of the HTML code I inserted a delorie.gif image so that the viewer could read my site. It was really neat to see the results. I have known one blind person in my life and wanted to volunteer at RFB&D.

Number of Links
The most interesting thing about search is that after 200-500 links to external pages the search engine optimization (SEO) will not pay attention to. Choosing which sites you anchor to is important.

Strategy of Choosing Words

When bidding on words the price of the word is not the only consideration, but also the quality

Ad rank = CPC bid x quality score

an expensive word does not mean your ad will be placed for sure, it also relies on how clickable your ad is. Adwords is like a word auction. You can place your bet but you want to make sure you have got a high quality website to sell.

Some Google Ads have images, which I imagine could boost the quality score.