Adventures in AdWords: GOMC Group Blog Post

As we embark on our Google Online Marketing Challenge project, we wanted to give a brief overview of the organization we have selected, as well as highlight three Adword features we felt were noteworthy and important additions to a marketer’s toolkit.

American College of Chest Physicians (CHEST) is the organization we have selected for our GOMC team. The organization is a professional medical society and offers membership, leadership, as well as several educational opportunities to pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine clinicians. We have worked with the organization and determined that their annual board review courses are a good fit. The courses prepare physicians for taking their board certification exams, and also offer a boot camp-like opportunity for other clinicians who are not required to take board examinations.

Now, on to Adwords! Adwords is a familiar concept, but there is more to the tool than simply paying for advertising. Lets check out three important features helping to connect individuals with products and organizations.

· Ad Rank Formula. How does Google decide which company’s advertisement will show up first when a customer uses it’s keywords in his / her search? We had assumed like many others that money was the deciding factor. But Google actually uses a formula to determine the ranking order of competing ads. This New Ad Rank Formula is has three components, the Max Bid, Quality Score and the expected impact from your ad extensions and formats. Ad Rank plays a huge role in determining the prominence of the ads on a search results page and the cost-per-click.

· RLSA or Remarketing Lists for Search Ads. An other important feature is RLSA or Remarketing Lists for Search Ads, which lets companies customize it’s search ads campaign for people who have previously visited it’s site and tailor bids/ads to these visitors when they're searching on Google. When people leave a site without buying anything, remarketing lists for search ads helps the company reconnect with these potential customers as they continue using Google Search. Companies can set your bids, create ads, or select keywords, keeping in mind that these customers have previously visited your website.  Adding code to every page of companies’ website allows the code will be added to the user’s cookie and they will be on the remarketing lists.  Companies can reach them when they search on Google or other websites, which display Google advertisements.

· Enhanced Sitelinks. Finally new Enhanced Sitelinks provide advertisers with far greater control over the appearance of their ads. For example, companies can now schedule its sitelinks to talk about lunch specials at lunch time, or dinner specials in the evening. (Genius!) Moreover, it can designate sitelinks as being mobile preferred, thus providing an opportunity to present ads that are more relevant to the user context (i.e. where, what time, and from what device did the search originate from). Best of all, it can all be done within a single campaign now.

We’re looking forward to putting these tools to use to promote the CHEST Board Review courses with Adwords this quarter.