I’ve been some what lazy in the department of marketing the services of my company. Until now I’ve mostly relied on my network to spread the word, but now I’ve decided to try out online marketing in combination with the launch of the new company site. Not that I haven’t tried it before, I actually did try Google Adwords about three years ago.
Naturally I went for the first obvious choice: Google Adwords. I still had my old account and I could even remember my password (waouw). The user interface is still pretty much the same, though, a message from Google did notify me about a soon change in the layout (actually here in february).
Looking at my account a quickly noticed my old campaigns, still being there – luckily they were deactivated. So it was rather easy for me to continue with the same campaign, slightly changing the keywords and budget.
Then going for the obvious, how does the billing look like … and what is that?! I had an outstanding for DKK. 97,- from back in 2008. Looking further it seems as if Google only bills when you have an outstanding for app. DKK. 2.800,-. I guess I’ll just have to stop the campaign when it reaches DKK. 2.799,- 🙂
Then it was time for my favorite social network: LinkedIn. Being a bit sceptic about social marketing, as how often is it that you actually do look at these adds? Like never. But well I’ll give it a try, as I can control the budget. Creating the add was quite easy, writing it in danish as I geographically only targeted parts of Denmark. Up and running … no! Waiting for approval. Five minutes later I received an e-mail from LinkedIn, that it wasn’t approved due to “Advertisement is in an unsupported language. English is currently the only supported language for advertisements.“.
A bit strange that you can geographically be very specific, but at the same time not even write it in the language that matches the region (I guess they have difficulties with charactersets :)).
Ok, so I had to translate my add. Not hard, but given that the number of characters had to be within 75 chars. and the english words was longer than the danish – I had to give it some thought. So now I was up and running, by accident I’ve chosen the budget/bid to “Pay Per 1.000 Impressions (CPM)” … or maybe it was default – don’t remember it. So I logged out and out of curriosity I just logged onto LinkedIn. Hey, impressive there’s the add!. Closed the browser, tried again … Waouw, there’s the add again … nice! I logged into my account and checked the stats. During that time, the impressions has skyrocketed to 577 impressions and what is that? I could already see the dollars ticking out of my wallet, so I was billed for the impressions. That was naturally a mistake. I quickly changed the budget to “Pay per click (CPC)” and in some minutes I saw the stats, still giving impressions – but the dollars staid in my pocket. What I don’t understand is why, I saw my own add. Obviously I’m not interested in seeing my own adds and even less in paying for seeing my own adds! You can do it better LinkedIn.
And now only a couple of hours later, I saw the first actual click – amazing – I can’t remember I’ve ever clicked one of those. But if I see one from one of my competitors – knowing they probably are using CPC – I’ll naturally perform an autofire click on the add (just kidding).
Now going to relax, I justed logged onto Facebook. Hey I forgot, Facebook also have adds. Time to check that out. Compared with Google Addwords and LinkedIn Adds, this was by far the most appealing process of creating the add. Frankly, I don’t find it appealing to have my credit card information associated with my Facebook account – but there was no other way. Continously checking the add pages to see how many impressions it was getting, I suddenly discovered the “Status” column. Well, too bad … it has to be approved. That obviously takes longer than with LinkedIn (impressive five minutes). So lets see if this one is accepted, time will tell.
I’ll return with a post, with some stats on my adds – when they’ve been on air for some time.
