This year, me and a group of 4 others decided to enter the Google AdWords Competition. We had to find a company that had never used AdWords before as part of their campaign, and get them to agree to us conducting an AdWords campaign for them. Google would then give us $200 to try run a 3 week campaign successfully.

Before this competiton, I never thought that so much time and work was going to have to be put in to the preliminary stages of the competition. I initially thought that you just had to think of a bunch of words or sentences that could be put on to the Google page when people searched for thosoe terms. Oh, how I was wrong. There are so many other elements that come in to it.

Firstly, you have to choose the sentences that people are most likely to search for regarding a particular topic. So for example, our company is a fast-track plumbing course in Bournemouth, and so one of our sentences is ‘become a pumber’. You then have to decide if you want that sentence to be exact (so the advert will only appear on the Google page if the person types in those exact words), or broad (where the advert will appear if the person only types in one or two of the words, in any order).

It is better to use exact sentences, as then it is more likely that you will get relevant people clicking on the advert, which should increase the number of people going on to book a plumbing course. However, if you choose broad, you will get a higher volume of people clicking on the advert, yet many of them wont be interested in what it has to offer.

After this stage, you then have to decide how much money you want to assign to the sentence. The higher the price you assign to it, the higher the chance you will be at the top of the adverts. However, you don’t want to bid too high, as you could run out of money too soon. Therefore, you need to work out how much money competitors are putting on the same search terms as you, in order to assign an appropriate price.

I think our group is at the stage now where we are ready to make our campaign live! Very scary stuff! I will try to update you on how things are going with it… if I don’t blog about it in the next week or so though, it’s probably going horribly wrong! Wish us luck!