I woke up this morning thinking it was Friday. Talk about disappointment. I was SO LOOKING FORWARD to sleeping in tomorrow. C’est la vie.
As I’m prowling my Bloglines this morning, looking for something interesting to talk about, I came across this article at Galleycat about Boyd Morrison’s Kindle to published success. Inspiring.
What I’m actually thinking about this morning is Google AdWords. I got one of those $100 free Google AdWords credit things recently. I’ve gotten them before and never done anything with them because, well, at the time, I didn’t have anything to advertise but my blog, and also because I didn’t have a clue what to do with them. The latter still holds true, but now I do have something to advertise: Forsaken By Shadow (which got it’s 18th review this morning–thanks Liz!–and to Amazon, are you anti-non-American? Because all my non-American reviewers keep having trouble getting their reviews to post).
So I guess what I am trying to suss out is whether Google AdWords (particularly on a small scale), is actually worth pursuing. If I had written a non-fiction book that had a very specific target audience, I can absolutely see the value in using them. I just read a post yesterday about someone who did this (though dang if I can find the link now) with great success.
But I am really skeptical about their usefulness for fiction. For one thing, what the heck would my AdWords BE? There’s not room for blurbage. What would I put? No sparkley vamps here!
And really, do people LOOK at Google Ads? I mean someone must or they wouldn’t exist. But I would hazard (WHY do I always type that Hazzard like Hazzard County, GA?) a guess that MOST of us are so immune to that kind of advertising as to make it a waste of time. Our eyes are trained to skip over them to find the meat of whatever webpage we’re visiting. I confess I even tend to avoid them when they pop up in search results because I figure they’re scammy. Probably not always true but…eh.
Q4U: Does anybody know of anybody who has successfully used AdWords as promo for their fiction? Any articles? Posts? Links? Do share!
2 thoughts on “Thinking About Google AdWords”
Since Google Ads only charges you (and by extension your free coupon amount), when someone actually CLICKS on your ad, there is no real harm in it. If your ad is targeted adn people take the proper action when they get there, I see no harm in it.
I help manage an Adwords account for a small publisher of craft and hobby magazines. One of our problems was preventing “garbage clicks”. These are people who clicked through to our site, but when we analyzed where they had seen the ad, it was clear that the ad placement was inappropriate.
For example, one of our magazines is on the subject of crafting stuffed animals and dolls. When we specified keywords related to “dolls” we got a great deal of ad placement on sites devoted to online virtual dolls. People would click through from those sites, and cost us money, but their area of interest had nothing to do with our magazine, and their clicks would not translate into sales for us.
We were able to get the siuation under control by managing our keywords closely, and using the option to disallow placements on specific sites. But it was a fair amount of work.
Just a typical pitfall of Adwords.
But if you’ve got free dollars to work with, no reason not to set up a very simple and low-budget campaign and find out yourself.
-Steve