Hi all you vzaar readers, I’m Sami, the spring intern at vzaar. I come from France, where I’m studying Business & Management, and look forward to graduating in the field of marketing in 2010. My interest in sales, communication and new technologies made me choose coming to vzaar in order to experience a new form of online advertising; namely Search Engine Marketing (or Google Adwords if we are being more honest!).
When I first arrived at vzaar, I had very little knowledge of Adwords and I was wondering how I was going to be able to attract to the site new customers with no adverts on the radio, billboards or other forms of conventional media used for advertising. As I started to get familiar with the concept of bidding on keywords, writing new ads and managing a budget I quickly came to realize the amazing opportunity that Google offers businesses who want to compete at a global level.
Whilst Google Search appears to be simple and intuitive to use, Adwords seems a bit complicated when you first dip into it. It took me a fair share of time reading books, [watching tutorials](http://www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/), attending [webinars](http://www.google.com/adwords/webinars/) and some expert best practice sharing from the good guys at [Swoopo](http://www.swoopo.co.uk/), before I really get started but today I can say that I don’t regret it all and neither would you if you do ever decide to work with Adwords.
The apparent complexity comes from the sheer amount of possibilities I was offered from within the Adwords interface. Nevertheless the control on online advertising seems a lot more flexible and successful than any other form of communication based across the mass-media.
The main and most important thing I learnt is how to attract numerous visitors towards a specific website with a minimum budget in place. Whereas before I wasn’t familiar with the real detail of online advertising, I often used to ignore sponsored links and associate them with pop ups, banners or other modes of spam. In reality they represent a real chance for all e-commerce merchants to get significant more exposure on the web and change their visitors into targeted prospects whilst only paying when a user clicks on one of your ads.
On a daily basis I work towards acquiring always more users and converting them into paying customers through targeted ad campaigns. These ads are inspired by a very detailed list of keywords which we know people use to find our service. One thing I had to my advantage was that I didn’t have to start advertising from scratch as there were already a few campaigns that has been launched by the vzaar team and I must say that’s what helped me as I could observe and analyze what had gone before.
When I started, just 6 campaigns were launched and each had their own ad groups targeting specific themes and keywords we felt were relevant to the video product we are trying to sell. I had the chance to develop and manage more of them during my internship and I had a lot of autonomy in my work, leaving me free to do any changes I wanted as long as I could justify them. The beauty with adwords is that statistically its very easy, after a few thousand impressions, to see what works and what is doesn’t. I picked up Adwords on March 1st and you can see how over time our numnber of daily new users grew.
But the period in which we had the most people signing up was around late March and new users peaked on April 1st. This proved to be an April Fools of the acquisition kind though as we then realized that a lot of users from Asia and India were signing up for free without demonstrating any intent on uploading video. Adwords lets you target specific geographies so it was very easy to simply stop targeting Asia for a while and see if we could develop some better quality, local customers. As a result the volume of daily conversions fell but over time the quality of them improved. We’d take quality over quantity any day!
In the next two months before my internship ends, I am focusing on how to optimize our existing campaigns day by day and ensure that our performance sticks to the budget as close as possible. Adwords is an ongoing science that requires daily attention. I’m also researching new opportunities for vzaar by finding new businesses to target. I look forward to sharing some more insight before I leave.
Great that you have some good results from Adwords – it’s pretty flexible but I’ve found that you get out of it as much as you put in. i.e. just having things run on unchecked can end up being pretty inefficient. Was just wondering how much you’ve played with the ad copy in your ads? Noticed that similar ads do a lot of price-pointing, example bandwidth ‘free trials’ or technical info or benefits, like your search enhancer.
Hi Pascale – I’ve been using split testing a lot while creating ads to finally realize that it was often a small change of words or placement within the ad that would make the difference for the user. I would start by making several very differently structured ads communicating on the same idea, then while seeing what works and what doesn’t, I would start to get more and more specific using simple catch phrases. Capital letters also make a big difference. Highlighting important words by using them makes people notice more easily the ads. Eye catching you might say. Of course, content is very important as well and split testing allows you to keep a balance and alternate between clear and simple vocabulary and more technical info. Sometimes you expect a formulation to work better than another and it doesn’t, and vice versa. The promotional aspect of ads conception is crucial as well and as you are advertising in an extremely competitive environment which is Adwords, it’s always good to differentiate yourself by the offers you can propose (e.g free trial, cheap and user friendly, up to 2 gb per month for free etc…).