Google AdWord Service

This month is going to be a Google month. And no, this will not be a discussion of the Google IPO -- that's not our area of expertise. First, the Google AdWord service.

Google offers a useful service for getting your website listed quickly and inexpensively. It's called Google AdWords, and yes, it is paid advertising. Why use paid advertising when you could get your site listed for free in the regular listings? Several reasons:

1. It's faster -- 30 seconds after you create a Google AdWord it is up and working on Google.
2. It may end up higher in the listing -- for certain keywords, getting a top 10 or even a top 20 listing in the regular search results can be extremely difficult and costly. AdWords are often on the first page.
3. It may be cheaper -- True, a Google AdWords listing continues to cost as long as it is active, but then site optimization for regular listings has to be re-done regularly to keep a site near the top and can cost quite a bit.

If you look at a Google page after you have done a search, you will see the regular listings in their usual place starting at the left margin. But along the right margin will be smaller listings, called "Sponsored Links" (you may also see one or two Sponsored Links at the top). These are the AdWord listings. They work like this:

You tell Google what you want the listing to say. There are very strict limits on the number of characters, so you have to choose your words carefully. Then you tell Google what keywords you want this ad to appear for. Note that in search engine lingo, "keyword" means one or more words. So, for example, "Boston web developer" is a keyword we have used. Finally, you tell Google how much you are willing to pay for a keyword. Now here's the neat part: You don't pay when someone sees your ad, only when someone clicks on your ad to go to your website. The amount you are willing to pay per click compared to how much your competition is willing to pay for the same keyword determines how high in the list of Sponsored links your ad appears.

But don't get discouraged by that -- there have been a number of studies indicating that being second, third, or even lower in the list is sometimes better than being first. Apparently the world is suspicious of people who buy their way to the top but respect people who are trying hard but can't afford the very top dollar. Oh yeah, one other nice feature: You can tell Google the maximum you are willing to pay per day. This puts a limit on your AdWord expenditures. Once your ad reaches its limit it stops appearing for that day.

You can set up an AdWord campaign yourself, or you can have your web developer do it for you. It does take some patience and persistence to get the best results, but Google makes it relatively easy, since it shows your results by date range. A well-organized campaign will try several different wordings to see which ones produce the best results

If you are interested in setting up an AdWord campaign for your website, call or email us.

Privacy and Google's Gmail

This is the other side of Google. They recently announced a free email service, called "Gmail." Not only is it free but they are offering some enormous amount of storage, so that unlike some other services like Hotmail, your account doesn't get shut off if you don't empty it every day.

What's the catch? The catch is that they add advertising to your email. Hey, no big deal, what's a few ads? Unfortunately, it is a big deal, because they don't randomly insert advertising. They read your email electronically (in other words it's done by computer -- no human reads it) and using words or phrases in your email, they tailor the ads to the subject matter in the email.

The key to the problem is that Google is famous (or infamous) for storing everything for a long time. That means before long they will have a huge amount of data on the thoughts of every one of their Gmail customers. And since the government can get to that data with a subpoena, your privacy quickly becomes non-existent.

It's true, of course, that your email already gets stored on the server backups of your ISP. But retrieving that data would require much more analysis (that is, time and money) than retrieving the Google data. In effect, Google will be doing the analysis up-front, so the data that could be subpoenaed would already be reduced, sorted, and compiled.

Some of us are more paranoid than others about privacy issues, but if your particular paranoia extends to the government and your email, you have been warned.

Thanks for joining us this month. See you next month.