I've graduated to the Standard Edition of AdWords.

It's been twenty days since I started the Flatout Press ad campaign to promote "The Age of Hot Rods", by my dad Albert Drake. I started out with the simple edition of google adwords, and got the following results, which you can see in the chart:

• The ad showed 51,766 times


• 45 people clicked through the ad to the website flatoutpress.com


• The average cost per click was $.77


• The total cost of the ad for 20 days was $34.44.


• 94 visitors to the website (not shown in chart)


• I sold one non-related book via the website

Not too bad of a result. I only ran the ad in the state of Oregon, which kept some of the costs down. One drawback to my test was that Flat Out Press doesn't directly sell The Age of Hot Rods, so other than increased traffic to the website and one purchase of another book, I can't tell how well the advertising worked.


As you can see from the graphic (above) the Standard Edition is way more complex than the starter edition. You can run multiple ads, and you can have several variations of the same ad. With the Starter Edition of AdWords you could choose to show an ad for a state or a zip code, but that was it. Standard Edition can run an ad in more than one region, so I can choose to run the ad in the PDX zip code (97215) and also in the Seattle/Tacoma region. I could also run it for the whole state of Oklahoma if I wanted.

The cost per click (CPC) was something that concerned me. It cost almost a dollar every time someone clicked through to the website, whether they bought something or not. That can get expensive. I'd heard the the Standard Edition of google AdWords could help cut down the cost by allowing you to bid for your CPC. If you bid high, you get promoted higher in the search, if you're low, then you're lower, and might even drop to page 3 or 4.

The following graphic shows my bidding strategy for one ad campaign that's running in Oregon and the Seattle/Tacoma region.

I've set most of the max CPCs to $.27. Some keywords are more expensive, so I've set the max bids on those higher. I'm hoping that through a combination of limiting CPC and more focused keywords I can drop the cost down to $.50 or $.70 per click.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Min CPC, Max CPC and Avg CPC clarified
• Different Ways to Monetize Your Web Traffic
• A common misconception revisited
• How Google Ranks Ads for Adwords
• Google Adwords - All terms explained