Inspired by Eric Ries’ SEM on five dollars a day article, I decided to set up a little AdWords campaign for our Earth Hour event. The campaign was a bit of an experiment as we hadn’t advertised using AdWords before and weren’t too sure what to expect.

Overall, I was hugely impressed – the ad was able to drive fairly significant traffic to the site at a very reasonable cost. We were able to get great ad placement (often ours was the only ad showing) with a very low cost-per-click. Certainly in comparison with more conventional forms of advertisement, AdWords – especially with Google Analytics integration – offers more control and much better feedback and information.

One thing that struck me going through the process of getting set up with AdWords is that there is significant depth to the application and much to be learned about how to build an optimal campaign using it. One thing that I struggled a bit with was how to determine the estimated cost-per-click for newly added keywords. It seemed to be available with after digging around, but it strikes me that this is something that should be directly visible on the ad group page. Another thing that I found was that while cost for a phrase keyword match was generally cheaper than broad keyword match, this was not always the case. Some justification of the cost for a keyword would be useful (ie. “20 clients are already using these keywords” or something).

If you have any useful tips, advice or articles to read on getting the best results out of AdWords, please let me know.