Week 3 - MBA 6102 - Introduction to Search Engine Marketing and Adwords

 In chapter 2 of Introduction to Search Engine Marketing and Adwords it is assumed the reader has already began an ad campaign. Thus, it would be smart to have created a Google Ads account in order to follow along with the book. The chapter gives an in-depth guide of what to do with the setting when creating a campaign, as many first time GoogleAds users would likely use all default setting which is unnecessary. There are even screen shots of each step of the process making the guide very relevant to anyone who needs visual guidance. Personally, my first GoogleAds campaign, I just clicked through this part and kept everything as default.

 Some great advice from the chapter, “Don’t be too concerned about the web page itself, or how perfect the ad is, etc. I recommend just trying it so you can say you did” (Kelsey, 2021, p.19) For me, I was most worried about doing the ad campaign because I was advertising a company that did not even exist. I was advertising my coaching services with no intention of actually giving lessons for now. Nevertheless, learning how the campaign worked and what information you could get out of it was worth it. 

In my case, advertising golf lessons, it is important for the ad to reach potential local clients, which is nice as GoogleAds can target certain locations. Being able to set a budget is also important especially as a business of 1 person. If you were to forget to stop the ad campaign you might continue losing even if the campaign is unsuccessful. Luckily, with a certain dollar amount budget you are safe from overspending.

One interesting part about GoogleAds is the ability to bid for more clicks similar to the way you would bid on an item at an auction. Say you set your spending limit to $20, Google would not automatically take that $20 which is rather interesting. Most people think of a large company like Google and think they are money hungry. Instead, the more clicks you get, the more you spend within your budget. GoogleAds then gives the user the ability to track how effective the ads are by comparing your clicks with other information you might have such as sales, making return on investment very easy to calculate. 

I decided to research more on the bidding process and came across this video.....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNUSRL5kbYg

I recommend watching this video to understand what the bidding truly is especially if you have any questions about smart bidding strategies given by Google Adwords. These are pictured below...

The rest of the chapter is very informative on all of the tutorial related details one might need to know for their GoogleAds campaign. This includes scheduling the Ad campaign to end as to not keep spending on advertising longer than your company can pay for. Another option is to pause the campaign to continue later when there is more funding. There are also more details on creating the campaign and steps that were mentioned in chapter 1.