I’ve read a few articles over the last month or so suggesting that it can be good practice to serve ads for your own domain and company names to enhance your brand. Jennifer Slegg has a recent post about branding with adwords and it was that post that prompted me to try it out on a couple of my own sites. Jennifers new blog is well worth adding to your feed reader by-the-way.
To start with I’m just using our upthejunction and cardtart sites. I’m not currently using the content network – in fact I probably won’t at all, it’s not like we’re trying to be a high street brand. An immediate problem has arisen with cardtart though – the minimum bid for cardtart related phrases is way over the top and I’m just not prepared to pay. Even though we rank #1 for cardtart adwords feels there’s currently a relevancy/quality issue. Hey ho. The site has just this weekend gone live with a long, long overdue revamp (not finished yet either) so I’ll give the bots time to sniff around and see if the minimum bids drop to something more sensible.
I’d spotted a while back that Martin Lewis, the journalist that publishes this site (click my link, not his ad – we might be competing for a phrase but I don’t encourage that kind of ad clicking) has been bidding on card tart phrases for a while. I used to see a few debt consolidation outfits bid too but they’ve long gone – presumably the ad costs outweighed the income.
We rank #1 for upthejunction (yeah, that incredibly popular search!) but I can see that we’ve already had a couple of ad clicks. Quality is fine in this instance and click fees are just a couple of pence.
I’ll monitor what happens for a bit and I’ll then look to roll this exercise out on the other ad networks and also for some of our other sites.
