On The Pitch

Just for fun and $10 a month, I decided to sign up for Google’s AdWords. Like most blogs out there, I already include AdWords advertising on my site via AdSense. But I wanted to experiment with AdWords and see if it would draw more visitors to the site. At $10 a month, I wouldn’t go bankrupt, so why not?

For those of you not familiar with AdWords, you basically create a text ad that is tied to keywords and search phrases that you select. Google will display your ad in rotation with others anytime someone searches for a topic that matches your keywords or, via AdSense, includes ads on a webpage that contains your keywords. They separate out the search hits from the context based hits. So basically, you can see which of your search terms are the most popular.

This is statistically insignificant, but after a few days I got a kick out of which keywords I had selected got hit the most. An impression means my ad got displayed when someone searched for a similar topic – but doesn’t indicate that’s how many people actually searched for that term – it would be much higher. But the ratio is telling.

Like I said – this data is meaningless in that the # of impressions is dictated not only by the number of people searching for a given term, but also by the number of advertisers who have this term selected (i.e. the more who use a given keyword for their ads, the less often your ad will likely get shown when that term is searched for)

But all the same I got a kick out of it – who says the era of the Soccer Mom is over. Of course when I told a friend of mine about this he chuckled and said ‘Well yeah, but these days a lot of people searching for that are probably searching for porn’ Which begs the question – how would he know THAT?

Oh and while we’re talking about AdWords, if you want to advertise your site to my 6 readers – click here!