Our work in the Ingenex internship keeps getting more interesting. Previously we learned how to choose the most appropriate keywords when optimizing a website for search engines. Google’s Keyword Tool and SEO Book helped us with this. Now we’re learning what to do with those keywords.

I used my own website Supraterranean.com as a test to implement the chosen keywords in automatically generated advertisements using Google AdWords. I typed in the dozen or so keywords, set the monthy budget and maximum per-click bid, and started the ad campaign. The results have been interesting, to say the least. In one week, my advertisement has had almost 40,000 impressions (i.e. – views). Only about 6,000 of those were on Google search results. The other 34,000 were on Google’s content network, the websites that have installed Google’s ad service to try and make money on a pay-per-click basis.

We weren’t sure if the content network would produce results, but out of the 8 clicks that linked to my website, 7 of them occurred on the content network. Only one click came from a sponsored link in search results. By the way, those 8 clicks have cost me about $1.86 so far, which I think is pretty reasonable.

I know that these findings are influenced by my extremely low budget, and that more of my ads would show up in search results if I paid more. However, these initial results are truly exciting, even just that I can expose my ad to 40,000 viewers in a week with such an efficient system. It’s great to learn about all the amazing services that Google is providing. They are a lot more complex than just a search engine, or even a search engine and worldwide map service. I’m sure I’ll be using their other services soon.