Reflections, Reflections

I had skimmed the explanation on the Google site before and found it confusing, and since I have never used Adworks, it was good to find Clayton giving a succint, but very clear real-life explanation about it:

Anyway, here's the cool aspect of AdWords: other than paying $5 for a setup charge, the only time I pay for advertising is when someone clicks on the ad to go visit the ScopeRoller website. If thousands of people see my ad--but never click over--it costs me nothing. If someone is sufficiently interested to click over, there's a good chance that this is someone that might be interested in my product.

The pricing is very clever. You can select a priority for placement of your ad by specifying a maximum amount that you are willing to pay per click--from as little to a penny per click, to whatever amount makes sense. As you increase what you will pay per click through, it increases the frequency with which pages that have matching keywords or phrases will display your ad--and it gives you an estimate of the number of customers that will see the ad. I discovered by experimenting a bit that there was no advantage to paying more than $0.20 per click for one set of keywords, and a bit less for another.

You can also set a maximum daily budget--as soon as you have spent $2 for the day on a particular ad campaign (to use a silly example), it stops showing ads. This helps you to avoid someone intentionally clicking tens of thousands of times on your ad but never buying anything, and driving you into bankruptcy.

The keywords and phrases that I am using are all related to the Losmandy and CI-700 mounts, and so they aren't appearing a lot. Yesterday I only had 31 impressions, and none of them clicked through--but it didn't cost me anything, either.