Did you get a coupon in the mail in November for a free $100 worth of AdWords ads? I'm not sure who got them, but I did, and I spent a long time reading it all to see what the catch was. Well, there wasn't much of one. It really is $100 of free advertising. I had to pay $5 activation fee, but there is no contract for a certain amount of time or need to buy any additional ads. The one "trick" is that I need to watch how the funds are being used up, and cancel the ad when it is at about $100.
I decided to advertise my book, North Country Cache. After I got the ad set up, and paid my $5, I had to choose some keywords. I filled in a whole list of words and phrases relating to hiking, women hikers, trails, etc. (The book is my adventures while hiking 2300 miles of the North Country Trail.)
The second day, the ad was shown 88,000 times, and received 36 clicks, but no sales. As you can see, after day 2, the number of times it was shown falls off sharply. I think this is what has happened.
My book, although written so that anyone can enjoy it, is considered a niche book. On the first two days, I believe the ad was shown broadly across all of the keywords that I chose. Now look at the next graphic.
After some initial displays, Google analyzed which of those keywords were performing up to some standard, and stopped showing the ad on other keywords. So now I'm only getting about 1000 impressions a day on two keywords: "hiking," and "hiking trails." Of course this means that my $100 will last a lot longer since I only pay for clicks, and there have only been 0-1 a day with such a low number of impressions.
I was hoping to sell perhaps a couple of books before Christmas through this means. At this rate of clicks though, given some low percent of clicks that will convert to sales, I doubt I'll sell any.
Still, it's good to get the exposure. Research says that (on average) people have to see something 8 times before they buy, so I need to get my book in view. I doubt that I'll renew, but who knows, so far I've only used $15 of the $100.
See Books Leaving Footprints for North Country Cache
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