05 February 2006
Last week I wrote a short post about why Semantic has never advertised. But I also said I was starting to consider having a crack.Over the past few months I've begun clicking on the Adwords that crop up next to Google Search results. That's a big deal because I pretty much ignore other forms of web advertising... and so do most of the people I know. So what's going on with Adwords?
I think they work for two reasons:
1) They arrive when I am looking for something (i.e. searching on Google)
2) They are often very relevant to my search.
If these two vectors were laid out on a map the point where they cross would have a little picture of a gold mine next to to it... because they're the reason Google is worth a trillion million gazillion dollars. Adwords quietly deliver what the user wants, at the exact moment they want it.
Naturally I've been looking into it... and I like what I see.
Before I tell you why allow me to simplify the advertising process to a point where experts will be chewing off their arms and legs.
1) an ad is created (either by you, or by your ad agency)
2) the ad is placed where your target demographic hang out (either by you, or your media buying agency)
3) you wait to see what happens.
I can hear the knives being sharpened as I write, but you can see why someone like me might consider advertising a bit of a lottery. Sure you can stack the deck with clever, creative and surprising ads. You can hire famous people to tell the world how great you are. You can test a campaign extensively. And so on and so on and so on... but in the end you have to wait to see what happens.
Adwords changes that* because you only pay for a result. If you don't click on my ad I pay nothing! That's a pretty big difference right there.
But there's more. Adwords are vastly more flexible than traditional advertising.
If I want to advertise in my local paper I need to get the ad in four days before it goes on sale. To appear in the Yellow Pages I must commit to the same ad for a whole year! If I am a big advertiser I might spend months working on a campaign... so I better hope my competitor doesn't come out with something twice as fast and half the cost the day before my campaign runs... because the time and the money are gone already.
But with Adwords you can create, change or remove a campaign in a few moments... which is like throwing a hand-grenade into the middle of traditional advertising... and it solves a lot of the problems I have with playing with the medium.
Actually there's loads of stuff that makes me want to try Adwords. I can set budgets and know that my costs will not be exceeded. I can test groups of ads against each other and see what works. I just love the fact that Google rewards successful ads with higher placement.
(Your position in the Adwords listing is a multiple of your bid on a particular keyword and your click-through ratio. Not surprising really that Google would want 'popular' ads near the top, as that's how they get paid. But the promotion of effective ads is a win/win scenario... and at the other end of the scale ads that are clicked less than 1/200 appearances are usually aborted by Google. As usual for those guys it's all about the relevance).
So here I am intrigued by Adwords, although those of you who follow Semantic will have realised the flaw in my plan.
I have no product to advertise.
Semantic is full. We haven't really needed to advertise for 8 years, and these days we really really don't need to. We have plenty of work between now and the summer, and setting farther targets than that goes against my Flexibility principle.
So for the moment they'll be no Adwords from Semantic, although I am itching to try it out. I do have one thought about something we could market online, but that's a story for another post.
*I am aware that Adwords is squarely camped on ground trail-blazed by Overture, but as I haven't used Yahoo for years I am sticking to Adwords for this :-)
Posted by Nick Warren at 4:12 PM
