Advertising 102...

Our Google Ad

We just completed our Google ad campaign. Of the three campaigns we ran, this one was the most interesting to me. Facebook and MySpace gave us some options for customization since they track the demographics of their users, but Google gave us the ability to select keywords. This means that we could type in the keywords for the typical search that we think people who might want our app would use. Then, Google would place our ad where those people would see it.

One of many nice features of the Google AdWords tools and resources, is that Google rates your keywords, tells you how likely they are to produce results, and recommends additional keywords. Also, in their list of suggested keywords, they estimate how many people use this search term. When you see that one term is estimated to be used 1,000 times per month and another is 135,000 times, you really want to select the 135,000 times term! In our case, we couldn't use it because it was a search for free iTouch apps.

Google's suggested keywords

Google also allows you to select sites where you want to see your ad. Instead of selecting a specific demographic such as "professional women in Slovakia and India between the ages of 50-60" (just for example...) as you would in Facebook or MySpace, you can type in "parenting.com" and "ivillage.com/kids" or choose from a list of sites that they have suggested because of your keywords (by the way, pages within babygaga.com came up a lot in their list for us) so that Google will place your ads on these pages.

Some of these "big name" placements come at a premium, but that seems normal to me. Lyle and I have been trying to understand the pricing and logic behind these new online venues—not that they are difficult or opaque, just new and different.  So, it was a welcome "normal" for us. This was the first time we could see the parallels between the online and print advertising experiences—it was like placing an ad on the front page of a newspaper section rather than toward the back or advertising in the big paid newspaper and not in the free small local paper.

After our five-day campaign at Google, we got about 150 clicks and nearly 80,000 impressions. Did that translate into sales? Maybe. I saw a "few" more sales than we had had during the prior weeks. There was a pattern and, as I said, I believe the sales went up a smidgen, but I can't say it was solely because of the advertising. And, as I wrote last time, it costs us at least $1 for every click and we get only $.70 for every sale, so unless we made more than 150 sales from this campaign, we could not break even.

But what about the multiplier effect? If we did get a single $.70 sale after spending at least $1, can we expect that this one single sale will lead to other sales? It certainly worked in Facebook and Twitter as Lyle built our following. How would you go about measuring this for sales? We are looking forward to the next lesson in our crash course on advertising.

(By the way, did you know that SoDunked! is the app that makes kids—and the rest of us—giggle?!)