Pete Ware

I’ve been monitoring the results of trying a Google AdWord campaign ($25 for a month). This is the third day since I started to “brand” myself (it’s more painful then it sounds). Here are the searches that resulted in a click through:

• “andaconda sports”
• “python” but it was a search limited to www.france-pub.com
• “snake game”
• “where can i sell my snake”

Google associates Python, a programming language in my world, with “snakes”.

I went back to Google AdWords to refine my keywords and discovered a few more details. For example, you can add a “-” to mean “not this word” and you can surround a word in quotes to avoid the broad match (e.g. “snake” matches “python”). Here’s the set of words I’m using now:

PyQt
django
pyqt
python qt
qt
qt designer
"python"
-snake

So far I’ve spent $1.63 for six click thru’s that are totally worthless. That’s not such a big deal at this point though it does warn me about two things:

1. If you don’t have an easy way to monitor what search words are being used you shouldn’t be using AdWords.
2. A lot of people just click on the first thing that shows up. I have no idea why someone looking for “snake game” would click on a linke “Pete Ware — Developer”!

I woke up early this morning and decided using Google AdWords was a brilliant idea and not at all creepy. So I followed the advice in item 5 and took out an ad via Google AdWords.

I chose pretty strange search words (python, qt, PyQt) so it’d be cheap. I also limited the searches to New York (fewer adds served). Finally, I had a $25 credit so it’s essentially a free experiment.

So searching Google for “PyQt” in New York results in this display:

The text is lame but it’s easy to change.

Google AdWords now shows I’ve had 850 impressions (Impr) and one click through (Clicks). What, I actually had a click through!

I better go check that click through out:

(that’s from WordPress and the StatPress plugin). The person was searching for “andaconda sports” and the results look like:

The first time I looked, my page showed up first.

So the person immediately clicked on the very first link! That bozo cost me $0.43 while looking for a sporting goods store! I’m a software developer! WTF?

So how did my page show up? Google must have figured “Andaconda” was really “Anaconda” (which is a snake) and further decided that Anaconda and Python are related. So the bozo must be interested in me because I mentioned Python. So that blows half my advertising budget for today!

This article has some interesting ideas about looking for a job in our brave new world. I’m not wild about the idea of establishing a “brand” (go figure since I’m doing this on peteware.com) but it’s certainly conventional wisdom that you find a job by knowing people.

I need to ponder idea (5) — taking out a Google AdWord is either brilliant or really creepy. From 7 Secrets to Getting Your Next Job Using Social Media:

5. Advertise your brand using AdWords and Facebook Social Ads Google AdWords is Google’s advertising platform, which offers CPC (cost-per-click) and CPI (cost-per-impression) pricing for advertisements on Google and partner sites. Some of their partner sites are newspapers, radio and TV.