July 13th, 2010

The Naked Ads: Make Your Predictions

This is part of a series of articles about how Fight is approaching using some free advertising. It all kicks off here.

In this post I thought I’d share the ads that we ran on both LinkedIn’s DirectAds and Google’s AdWords, but a couple of unexpected things happened that I thought I’d talk about first.

We were planning to kick everything off on Friday, July 9th, and let the ads run until the 31st. Our landing page wasn’t ready to go until the campaign launched, but we preloaded all of the ads into both Google and LinkedIn so that everything would be ready to go (with Google, you could schedule the date – but not the time – that the ads would start running; with LinkedIn we’d have to kick it off manually). AdWords complained that the landing page gave an “Invalid HTTP response code”, which is what happens when the page isn’t there yet. We didn’t worry much about it since the campaign wasn’t scheduled to go for a couple more days, and surely AdWords would check back in at the time the program launched.

Sadly, no. We got the landing page up and running, and when it was time for the ads to start circulating, the error status didn’t change. Now, when you have an error on an AdWords ad (usually because something requires review), Google recommends that you edit the ad to make the recommended change. Our ad didn’t need any change, but we still had to go into each one and put an extra space into them so that AdWords would recognize that a change had happened. A minor irritation, but ultimately no big deal.

But then, the really unexpected: We got kicked into a manual review. This meant that our ads would have to be looked at by actual people before launching. I’ve seen that process take weeks (rarely, but it happens), so I wasn’t thrilled that the time to use our free credit (which expires at the end of the month) as running out. In fact, it only (!) took until late Sunday to get approval, so we’re finally up and running.

But to the ads!

We plan to make adjustments to ads and keywords as we go, but here are the ads that we are starting with. If you have any predictions as to what will perform the best (or worst), toss them into the comments. We’ll update the stats as we go.

AdWords Ads: