Pleasanton Web Design

Google Adwords Express is the stripped-down version of Google Adwords, the pay-per-click search engine advertising program that is Google’s bread and butter. Adwords Express launched last summer and has had mix reviews from advertisers.

The idea of Adwords Express is to give the non-techie business owner a way to spend money on local advertising with Google Adwords. Everything about the campaigns are automated, and the set-up is extremely fast, performed through your Google Places account dashboard. The problem? As with any activity, businesses not willing to put the time (do it yourself) or money (hiring a professional) into it will generally get little out of it. The standard Google Adwords certainly has a steep learning curve that gets steeper as time goes on, but without that learning period a small business advertiser will not understand online advertising enough to get much out of it.

The main benefit of Adwords Express touted by advertisers is that of increasing “local visibility.” So if you are not worried about getting clicks and converting them to sales, but rather just exposing your brand to the local searching public, maybe Adwords Express is a no-brainer. However, if you are looking to expand your audience beyond a 15 mile radius of your physical location, you can’t do that with Adwords Express.

Another major limitation, in my opinion, is the fact that you can only create a single ad per business category that you have listed in Google Places. So if what you want to advertise is not represented by a category in Google Places, you’re out of luck.

Does the “Express” mean that Adwords Express is less expensive than Adwords? In the competitive niche I did my research for, the answer was “No.” The cost per click (CPC) was within the same general range, but on the high end.

Based on my research, I don’t believe Adwords Express gives the small business owner the tools necessary to run and efficient campaign. This, coupled with the fact that the CPC costs are no lower than a standard Adwords campaign, makes it difficult for me to see how it would be possible to get a positive ROI when using this service.

What kind of social networking activity do you need to do to achieve top ranking on Google? To begin to answer that question I employed a tool called Shared Count http://sharedcount.com, which displays the number of social networking “shares,” “likes” or other positive signals pointing to any URL you enter into the box.

For instance, how much social networking activity would you need to rank number one for an ultra-competitive phrase like “social media marketing?” Here’s the data I got:

That’s a lot of activity! Keep in mind to that this is a quick and dirty test, and doesn’t take into account the more traditional signals of quality in search engine algorithms, like backlinks, linking domains, etc.

One think you may also notice is zero Stumbles. Either the StumbleUpon part of this tool is broken, or StumbleUpon is dead. I expect the former is probably the case.

For the next test I chose an article on a blog written and I’m assuming promoted by some guys who know what they are doing with regards to social media.

Again we see zero Stumbles and only one Digg. Does this mean Digg is dead? This might confirm your previous suspicions.

What conclusions can we draw from this quick and dirty test? People who know what they are doing with regards to social media are presumable promoting a lot of activity on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and to a lesser extent, Google Buzz. Maybe you should look into doing the same!

Today I’ve put together a particularly horrifying web design process. Please don’t actually follow these steps  (if you can help it).

1. Start the project by creating some visual mockups. Don’t worry about the content yet. You can just plug that in later when the website is completed.
2. Adjust the mockups based on each and every criticism made by the person responsible for the approval. This is especially important if the person requesting the changes has no design training.
3. Once the mockups are approved, build the website. Make sure to use dynamic drop-down  menus, or create the whole website in Flash.
4. Start writing the content. Someone in the company can steal text from competitors’ sites, or scribble some notes and hand them off to the designer to fix up. This is also the perfect time to brainstorm and come up with new sections, pages, features and functions to add to the website.
5. Find some pictures to put on the website. There must be some laying around somewhere, so dig them up. The designer will be able to clean them up in Photoshop if they aren’t that good. There are also may cheap stock photography websites out there that have some good pictures.
6. Plug the content into the website. Whoops! It doesn’t exactly fit. Rather than going back and redesigning the site from scratch, recode each of the pages to make it fit. If there are pages or sections you failed to include in the navigation just add the links somewhere and make them flash or blink to get the visitor’s attention.

The website is finished! It doesn’t look very good and isn’t user-friendly, but it’s a website!

Have any additional steps to add? Let me know.