Learning2.0 : Journey to about2findout.com

A week ago I launched the site with the World Aids Day Quiz. (World Aids Day is held on Dec 1 every year, so it seemed appropriate as the site opened that day.) For promotion I toyed with the Google AdWords advertisement service.
So, how did it go?

- AdWords: I had advertisements for 7 days, and set a maximum of 5 euro/day. In total I spent 32.87 euro, which gave me 327.933 ad impressions. 451 people clicked on the ad, which means a CTR (click through rate) of 0.13% and it cost me 0.07 euro cent per click on average.

- AdSense: On the other hand, I earned 3.03$ the same way from people who clicked on the ads. There were 1835 ad impressions on my site with 22 clicks.

- That already shows the brilliance of the Google business model :-). I must say, AdWords is a very well designed service and very addictive. You can see real time how your campaign is doing and bid on keywords. Is there a medical name for Google AdWords Addiction yet?

- On the site itself, I saw an increase in average visitors/day from 15 to 75. I count 986 visits of which 859 unique visitors. They stay on average 3.40 minutes on the site.

- The 5 countries with most visits are in order: USA, India, Belgium, UK, Canada.

- 73% of my visitors use Internet Explorer, 22% uses FireFox.

- The quiz itself: the 9 questions are answered between 130-175 times, only 15 people created an account.

- The most difficult question is the first one: only 44% knows the actual number of AIDS/HIV infected people. Do you? (Hint: the number went down compared to last year, but only because of improved statistical methods.)

Labels: adsense, Adwords, AIDS, World Aids Day

Now that a beta version of my site has just gone live, it is time to promote it! So I've decided to try out the world's most famous Internet advertisement company: Google. Google has a paying service (that generates about all of its income by the way) called AdWords. It allows you to create the familiar ad campaigns you see on the Google search pages. The principle is simple: you create your ad and link it with a list of keywords. Then you say how much you are willing to pay per click (I chose 0.09 euro cent because the estimator didn't give any results below that) and a maximum amount you want to spend a day (I chose 5 euro). An auction mechanism then determines what users will see your add based on the search terms they entered and other advertisers that bid for the same words.

The setup of the account was easy. You get the choice between a starter and a standard account type. The differences are listed here. I had to go for a standard account because otherwise I could only target one country. There is a lot of help assisting you choosing the right keywords and settings. But you should very carefully check the review page just before you sign up! All of the sudden Google had changed my maximum rates to 500 euro a day and 9 euro per click. I suppose a calculation error with the comma, but not funny if it is your money. So I went back and changed it. I also linked my AdWords account with my Google Analytics account.

I obviously don't want to go broke on AdWords because I'm running a completely free site here, but I want to see its effect and play around with it. The campaign I'm running right now is about the World Aids Day Quiz. I'll let it run for 1-2 weeks and let you know its impact in a follow-on post.

Labels: about2findout, Adwords