Marshall starts out with a very important point, are people searching for what you are selling? What he means with this is that even is something sells, it doesn’t mean that people will search for it. He takes toilet paper as an example. Everybody buys toilet paper, but has anyone ever searched for it? Another problem he mentions is if you have a new product that people don’t know exist, how are they going to search for it? He gives the example of someone inventing a pill that will prolong your life for ten years. Everybody would be interested in this product, but how many people searched for “live ten years longer” this morning?
But let’s say that people are searching for your product. Marshall makes the point that AdWords isn’t necessarily the best place to advertise in order to draw customers to your page. He has found another use for it. He proposes that you use AdWords as a testing place for your new add campaigns. There are a few key elements in how AdWords works hat makes this possible. First of all, AdWords rewards good ads. If allot of people click on your ad, the ad will get a higher position in the rank, and/or will cost less/click. It also lets you post multiple ads against each other, thus allowing you to test what campaign is best. You also get a good idea about how your ad stands compared to the competition.
So after you have tested different ads and finally come up with the best one you can start advertising in other places, like banners or affiliates.
To me this sounds like a very smart thing to do. It is very easy to use, and most likely very cost efficient considering all the great data you will get out of it.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I think it was great to read about this new and creative idea of Marshall's. We've seen way too little novelty in the previous interviews. The idea is smart and quite exciting, though I can't imagine it driving any revolution.
Also, his reasoning really highlights why search based ads and search engines aren't the answer to everything, which is a refreshing and probably quite healthy breather for us, having focused so much on the blessings of search engines in the previous interviews.
That's actually a quite interesting point. We've read so much about SEO and all the like in the past interviews, but what if you're selling a product that noone actually searches for? What do you do then? I totally agree with Filip's comment up here: it's nice to hear that SEO isn't the answer to everything!
In any case, using AdWords to test your ads does seem like a quite clever thing to do, though I don't really feel like it would be something that catches on.
Indeed, that's why people say google is the best consumer research tool ever invented. This low cost test will benefit especially small sized company who couldn't afford expensive consumer research before
Post a Comment