The thing about Display Network

So we have been using Display Networks for a few days now. Yes it makes your CTR hit the bottom, around 0.09% to be exact. I've tried specific placements but I just cannot compete since our non-profit is about travel. Big tour agencies have lots of budget for advertising so naturally the price really goes up for travel and tour related keywords. But, I really think it might be worth it for a really low average CPC. Our average CPC for a week is quite low and for a competition with a limited budget I think a low CPC is a key element since the only way you can maximize your click is pretty much through low costs. I will try to target the Display Networks much more specifically and see what happens. Although one might think that we don't have much time left for experimenting with stuff since our campaign has to end in a couple of days for the challenge, but I think the main aim of this competition has to be the learning part instead of the winning part. And boy have I learned lots of stuff.

GOMC Team

I've been meaning to write this yesterday but it seems it flew off my mind. We had mailed the GOMC support about a problem we were having with the billing and a question unrelated to billing on the day of our campaign start. We did manage to start the campaign as the error we got disappeared after sometime, but if it hadn't, if had that problem, it would take 6 days for the GOMC support to reply us. This is kind of disappointing. Though, from what I hear there are around 50k students in the challenge which would make roughly 10k-11k groups which must be pretty overloading for the GOMC team.

In the response mail the member of the adwords team directed me to the GOMC group which has been inactive for a few months now. This inactivity works both ways though. It means that the GOMC groups hadn't been utilizing this group for support. But I also think it's the GOMC team's fault as this was the first time I've seen the mention of the group even though I've been through the GOMC guidelines as well as the website a few times. I believe both the guidelines and the website could be much more informative in so many ways. I understand that it must be hard to manage a challenge this big, but I believe the level of preparedness could have been better. On the other hand though, I love and realize how they tried not to exclude anyone from this unique opportunity, and having been registered pretty late myself, I am grateful for it.

Another thing I've realized today was that I've been missing cool GOMC hangouts in Google Student's G+ page which I was pretty sad about because they do look pretty good. You can find them here.

A Confession

I have to confess that I do not fully understand nor trust QualityScore. In the Turkish keywords I use I have pretty good CTR (which is totally understandable since it gets lower impressions anyways) a good average CPC and good QualityScores while my English keywords are hitting the bottom right now in regard of QS. I get low ad relevance even though I believe the ads are pretty relevant. We even made changes to the websites to increase the QS in regards of the landing page.

Of course this is probably my lack of understanding of the algorithm behind QS and I definetely need to look into this issue if I want to get some clicks from my English keywords. Of course I probably can get even better performance from the Turkish keywords, but our conversions, as in booking a customer is, are targeted mainly at the US, UK, Australia audience. So I have to keep them running if we're hoping to score tour bookings which are definitely not for everyone.

AdWord Support and Display Network Experimenting

I wrote a couple of days ago that I had run into a problem with my ads with some trademark issues. I wrote to AdWords support regarding the problem with the word "buzz." To my surprise, they responded pretty fast and looked into the issue. I of course could and did use another word in my ad to keep it running, but my intentions were feedback oriented. After I wrote to them they responded and solved the issue in very fast pace, which made me pretty happy. I think it's pretty amazing that they can respond to problems, even minor ones such as this, this quickly and resolve the issue with ease. Support I believe is one of the most important aspects of user experience.

Since I'm still in the process of experimenting with thousands of combinations of options and possibilities in AdWords, I decided to opt in to showing my ads in "Display Network." This is basically the option to show your ads in websites that use AdChoices. This of course, I found, has its advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is you can target very specifically and you get to use that sites traffic to show your ads. The latter is also one of the disadvantages, you get to show your ads to so many people not looking for something, your click through rate hits the floor. But the tool tip explains that it's totally normal for display network ads to have a low CTR. The trick I think is to place the ads only in relevant sites you choose and not have automatic placement options which shows your ads everywhere somehow related to your keywords. Another disadvantage is, if the website you chose have mostly frequent visitors, you may not get any click at all after sometime. So what I'm going to do is, once I get a few clicks from that website, I'm going to move to a new one.

In short, I'm probably going to use this challenge period to experiment with AdWords but in a way that I can secure a good number of clicks whatever options I choose to use. Because there really is a number of ways to get those clicks, which is really cool.

Ad reviews

Our first problems with AdWords was when one of our ads was suspended due to a trademark use. The word that caused suspension was "Silk Road." I had no idea that such a historical term would be trademarked and I'm still not sure if it even is. After changing the adtext though, the suspension was lifted really fast. I was thankful for that.

Our second problem was with another trademark. This time the term was much more common: "buzz." Now I know even Google had a product called Buzz, but it's kind of weird that a common word which is used in lowercase letters classifies as a trademark. Thankfully the suspension on the ad was lifted when I changed that word as well.

Of course there are probably reasons for this kind of suspensions caused by trademark usage. But a feature could be implemented so that there's a warning when you might be breaking a specific rule or there might be trademark issues with that word or phrase. I'm not suggesting that this feature is critical or the way it is now is really bad. Because to be fair the email notification is pretty fast for a system on this scale. I'm simply suggesting that this feature would be pretty nice for beginners like myself. And with the pace that Google is improving AdWords, I believe we can expect something like this in the future.

Hello world

As I've entered the Google Online Marketing Challenge with Balyolu: the Honey Road, a social venture that offers a very unique experience with nature and honey tasting in Northeastern Turkey, I've decided to keep a blog about my thoughts on the challenge itself and AdWords. I have just met with AdWords, a truly remarkable experience for online advertising. I honestly did not think that it would have been this interesting. I believe using AdWords offers invaluable insight on Google's flagship product and the company itself.

We have just launched our campaign last Saturday and getting started to micro-manage our campaigns as of today as we explore the wide array of options available. I will try to post my criticisms and thoughs of the challenge as well as AdWords here as I experience them first hand.