Google AdWords: The good, the bad, and a few surprises

This past week, we set up our Google AdWords campaigns, and for our blog, we’re breaking down the good, the bad, the under performing and the surprises we’ve encountered while working in AdWords for the Google Online Marketing Challenge.

The good

Our ads are receiving clicks! Of course we knew we would get some, but there is always an element of fear when engaging in paid search. What if your keywords are horrible? What if no one cares?  Fortunately, we have seen some action.

We’re seeing some decent click through rates on our very specific ads when compared to the more general search terms.  However, we’d like to see our click through rates improve, so we have some tweaking to do.

The bad

Some of our negative keywords are suppressing our keywords from search. With an organizational name like CHEST, we’re of course, doing battle with some seedy ventures, so we’re trying to avoid getting those results. However, we’re learning it is a fine line and need to adjust and course correct as we go along, so we don’t miss valuable traffic!

Moreover, Google Adwords does not allow listing the keyword that contain pharmacy-related content.  Therefore, we cannot list the keywords contain “medicine”, such as “pulmonary medicine board” and “American Board of Pediatrics Pediatric Pulmonary Medicine”.  Our solution is to remove the sensitive words, so the keywords became “Pulmonary board” and “American Board of Pediatrics Pediatric Pulmonary”

Surprises

One of our ads is performing well, and we have been prompted by AdWords to up our budget for that campaign in order to not miss out on clicks. As a group we are now deciding how to handle this information.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is the need for flexibility, or testing, just as we’ve learned in our Internet and Interactive Marketing course.