AdWords can be tricky. Especially, if you have never worked with online advertising before.
Fortunately for me, I was lucky enough to have worked with Facebook’s Power Editor for a year, before I ended up in the situation where AdWords was suddenly my responsibility in the company I worked for.

So, what did I do?

I went straight to Youtube. I can’t count the things I’ve learned on Youtube. If you have time for tutorial videos on Youtube that is most definitely a good way to go. I can especially recommend this video: Insights on the AdWords Auction

After many hours on Youtube and about 6 months of using AdWords, many of my inital questions have been answered and others have arosen. AdWords simply keeps on changing.

Anyway, here is my guide on how to get through the first steps of an AdWords campaign. Some of my take-aways are probably not best practice. Maybe something has changed over time, or maybe I simply just got it wrong from the start (please speak up if you know better alternatives).

All right, let’s go:

1. If you are in doubt about how to navigate. For a simple usage of AdWords, just click on “campaigns” in the top of the screen. This is usually where you want to be.

2. When creating a normal AdWords campaign (click the red button that says “campaign+) you should only use “Search Network Only”. I say normal, because usually people associate AdWords with the ads that come up when doing a google search, and that is exactly what the Search Network is. The “Display Network” is other pages like online newspapers and review websites. The two networks are different and requires different ads, therefore you should keep them separate (click on the picture to amplify it).

3. When choosing location, you want to think about your target audience. Do you want to pay, so that people in Canada can see your ad, or is your ad only relevant for people living in Vancouver? It’s one of the more simple elements.

4. Language is a bit tricky, because Google doesn’t distinguishdi between the written words but between domains. So, if you choose English your ad will appear on the English version of google.com/ca, and if you choose French, your ad will appear on the French version of google.com/ca.

5. When you are new to AdWords, and you choose your Bid Strategy, you always want to choose the manual bidding. If AdWords were to optimize your campaign effectively, it would need a substantial account history.
It doesn’t really matter what Default bid you choose, because you will optimize your bid for each individual keyword.
You should optimize it every day, based on the suggested bid that you can find in the keyword planner:

Budget pr. day is tricky. Normally you don’t want to miss any clicks, which means that you never want to reach your budget pr. day, BUT when you have a limited budget that will not be the case. Set a budget, so that the campaign can run for at least 10 days.

6. Ad Extensions is always a good idea since they are opportunities to give more information, and at the same time make your ad more visible.
The extensions are “Shipping info” and “Product Ratings”. Without those to extensions the ad would have been much smaller and would have had less info, which in the end increases the chance of a good landing-page experience.

In my E-Marketing class today, we talked about content and online communities.

As for preparation, we had 7 articles which gave us different perspectives on the importance of great content, and presented tools that could help us on our misson to produce great content. – In total, a very interesting class!

However, after we finished class, something struck me: One thing is content, but what about the medium that facilitates the content?

Every medium carries a message

The great Canadian thinker (the picture really shows how much of a thinker he was), Marshall Mcluhan, once said that the medium is the message, which, if taken literally, would ruin the whole idea about concetrating on great content. BUT that perspective is also a bit to radical from my point of view.

Instead, I will allow myself to use Lars Thøger Christensen‘s more moderate interpretation of Mcluhan, which states that every medium carries a message.From this perspective, content and the medium becomes equal, and therefore deserve equal attention.

To me, the most important take-away from McLuhan’s work, is his way of thinking about media: A medium is the medium of another medium.

It is kind of a tricky way of putting it, but when one relates it to content marketing, it suddenly makes much more sense. One could say that a sort of media hierarchy appears.

An example of a media hierarchy:

1. You choose whether to go with an online or offline medium. An offline medium as a handwritten mail can carry the message of effort and therefore caring, but it can also carry the message of being out of tune with the new and “online” world. It depends on the person receiving the mail and the content of the mail.

2. You choose which online and offline medium you want to use. If you want to reach out to people in their privat sphere, you might go with Facebook. You don’t go for LinkedIn, which carries a message about professionalism.

3. You choose who should be the sender of the message. If your company has received massive critique and you want to make an apology, you might want to put an important person as the sender, because that will carry the message of your company actually caring about the critique.

4. You choose the “medium” of your content. That could be an apology – as stated in the example before – or the medium of the content could be a question. Depending on how “equal” the relationship is between your company and your customers.

And I could go on like this for quite some time…

My point is, we should always take the medium into account, when we talk about creating content, because you want the message of the medium and the message of the content to tell the same story.

I read an article today that learned me something that I thought I already knew – I just wasn’t really aware of it. Funny feeling. It was an article on Facebook by the Danish Social Media Expert Jacob Holst Mouritzen. The article’s key point was that there is a problem with the way we measure the engagement rate on Facebook. Jacob Mouritzen made several good points, such as:

• Today, we measure it by taking engagement (likes, shares, comments) and divide it by the total fans on a given day, but that doesn’t work very well with Facebook’s current algorithm. It doesn’t work because the algorithm decreases the reach to our fans and therefore businesses usually pay to increase reach – but the paid reach is not included in the calculation of the engagement rate. That makes the engagment rate misleading.
• The engagement rate can also be misleading because it doesn’t include the other possible interactions: Click on the link, click on the video/picture or likes on other users comments.

However, the point that really caught on to me was that, even if you calculated the engagement rate in a more accurate way (use reach on post instead of total fans on a given day), it still shouldn’t be the metric which guides your social media strategy. At least not on its own.

There are many ways of achieving a higher engagement and most of them will probably boost your engagement in the beginning, but hurt your brand in the long run. If you let the engagement rate control your strategy, you may end up  only posting give-aways and photos of funny animals.

When you think about, it’s quite simple. And I feel certain that I already knew this in some way, but sometimes it’s necessary to be reminded about the simple things.