Micro-ISV Tip #1: Google AdWords..
I
had occasion today to interview Emily White, Google AdWords Manager,
and she had some advice for micro-ISVs worth passing on. First off,
Google (http://adwords.google.com ) has started a new program called
JumpStart currently limited to U.S. advertisers who have not yet set up
a Google Adwords campaign. Google staff will look at your site and
build an AdWords campaign for you, and help you get your campaign
working. It costs $299 USD, plus what you end up spending on Adwords,
but once you start your campaign you get the $299 credited back to your
AdWords campaign.
Secondly,
and perhaps more importantly, if you’re like me and you’ve already set
up with AdWords campaign and gotten nowhere with it, White says you can
contact Google through the following link, and a Google staff person
will work with you to reshape your AdWords campaign, suggestions the
best ways to optimize it and your site. For Free. (When she said this, I had her repeat it because I wanted to be absolutely correct about this):
“We
provide a service for advertisers who have a campaign and its not
working as well as you like,” White said. “We call it in house
Optimization. So if the advertiser emails us through the contact us
form on our web site, and they say, ‘Hey, can you help me with my
campaign, its not performing as well as I would like, here are my
goals’, we will actually have an optimization specialist go into the
account, evaluate it, and publish suggestions for that account, such as
additional keywords they might want to add, or keywords they might want
to delete, or add text that might work better for that industry.”
White
continued, “So we currently provide services to help advertisers get
back on track and that free actually, that’s not a paid-for product.”
You can find that link at the bottom of the Google AdWords Help Center page:https://adwords.google.com/support/?hl=en_US (look for the Contact Us link). And you can find out more about the JumpStart program at: http://services.google.com/marketing/links/jumpstart/jumpstart_more
One
thing to mention: While how high your AdWord ads places in any
particular search depends on your ad budget in part, what really
matters is how relevant your adWord is to that search. Put another way,
if you AdWords are on target, chances are very good that your listing
in that search will be high because both AdWords and the main Google
search engine use the same proprietary PageRank algorethems to judge
how relevant you are to a given search.
A
P.S. for the suspicious: I am in no way (other than being both a paying
AdWords advertiser and in Google’s AdSense program) affiliated with
Google. [MasterList Professional Developer News]