We Are Up and Running

This is an exciting week.  We turned on our AdWords account and started getting results for our sites.  How exciting it is to see that people are actually finding our site with a google search, and some are even going to see what we have to offer.

Of course, now the real work begins.  We need to review the performance of our keywords and see which ones are generating hits on our site, and how much each hit is costing.  We can analyze our ads to see if we think they are directing people to our site.  This is fun and exciting, but also a little overwhelming.  As an Affiliate marketer there isn’t a real easy way to track conversions, or cost of conversions.  Fortunately, I can see some of this at the Amazon Affiliate site and make some assumptions.  The big key is to see which keywords are getting people to click to my site and see how long they are staying.  The longer they ae there, and the more pages they look at, the better chance I have of them seeing a product they are interested in and making a purchase.  I am very glad that we received an AdWords credit for doing this because my site isn’t primarily about generating income, but for sharing advice and my joy of family history.  I am hopeful that some of the links will interest people, and that they make a purchase, but that would be icing on the cake.  I am just excited to see that people are looking at the site and hopefully learning something.  I am anxious to move forward and see what other tools are out there to help improve my ads and keyword choices, and maybe even make a few dollars.  Have a great week, and if you have a chance drop on by and check out my site.  I will happily share the URL with anyone who is interested, and I look forward to seeing you all next week here on the ramble….

Analytics

  What an exciting week this was.  We explored the relevance of our ads and keywords, and we installed google analytics on our Websites and our Google AdWords account.  This is a tool that will help us improve our choices of keywords and ad content, and thus improve our traffic on our websites. 

This week also brought some challenges.  In the process of writing the second ad and checking the quality scores, I added my payment information to the site.  This caused my ad to start running for a day.  The video “Choosing the Right Campaign Type” gave great instructions for choosing a start date and an end date for the campaign.  Unfortunately, this video was a week too late, as we wrote our first ad last week.  This video needs to be a part of the previous week’s assignment since you can’t edit a start date.  I was able to pause my campaign, so no real harm was done.  Just another case of putting the cart before the horse. 

I am very excited to start running my campaign next week and studying the results from the analytics to find ways to tweak things to improve my traffic flow.  We will finally be up and running in the ‘real world’ and have information we can track and analyze. 

Next week here on the ramble we will be reporting our results for the first few days of our online experience.  Until then, stay safe on the trail…..  

Ads and Ad Groups

Further adventures in AdWords this week.  We wrote an ad for our campaign.  This entailed quite a bit of reading about creating an ad, and the rules and policies involved.   This was a real challenge because of the strict word count.  I really needed to do some serious editing to keep within the limits.  It was also hard to think in terms of an ‘ad’ when I am not selling a product.  As an affiliate, I will have links to related materials to my blog, but I am basically selling myself.  This will get easier when I have more content in my blog, but at first, there isn’t much to advertise.  I hope in the near future to pick up another affiliate connection with a company that prints fun materials using your family tree.  Once I am accepted, then I will focus some attention on their wonderful products.   It will be fun going forward to see how successful my choices will be. 

There are times when this class is very frustrating.  It seems that we are asked to do things before we really understand how to do them, but then in subsequent weeks we learn more and see how it all fits.  We also have a chance to refine our work before we go live.  I have to say, overall I am enjoying this journey, even though I often have no idea where I am going.  It is a nice challenge, and I am anxious to see it through to the conclusion.

So until next weeks adventures, I bid you Adieu.  See ya soon on the Ramble.

“What’s in a Word?”

Another exciting week in B-250.  This week we looked at keywords for our AdWords campaign.  We examined the characteristics of words or phrases as they related to an advertising campaign.  Is the Word too broad in connotation?  Is it too specific, or narrow?  These are all important considerations in an AdWords campaign.  The trick is deciding what word or phrase will attract people to our site who are interested in what we have there.  AS pointed out in several discussions, a very broad word, like “clothing” may attract lots of people, but If we are selling yoga pants, we will get lots of traffic from people that are not looking for our product.  Being too specific can be just as bad since we will not get the traffic so we may miss potential customers. 

Another area we looked at was the Automatic Bid function in AdWords.   In a blog on WordStream, I read about many pitfalls in the Auto Bid process.  While much of what I read made sense, and caused me concern over the use of Auto Bid, I realize that at this point in time I know so little about the bidding process that I don’t feel comfortable using the Manual Bid process.  I am sure that the time involved in learning the strategy involved, as well as the time involved in managing the ad campaign is far greater than the time I have available for this class at this time.  I truly hope that as this campaign runs I am able to gain some understanding so that I can make informed decisions in the future.

My big takeaway from this week is this: Words Matter.  One thing we can remember are the words of author Stephen King, who penned: “Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.” 

Have a good week, and see ya next week here on my Ramble.