Three Months in Brazil: June 2008

Google AdWords, the company's online advertising system, is one my international co-workers and I know well. If you're not familiar with it and you own a business, well, you should. And I hope you don't have kids under college age.

One night when a group of girls were out to pizza, Ligia started cracking me up with her analogies of AdWords and men. It made so much sense. (Of course, if you don't understand online marketing, it probably won't make any sense.) Other girls started chiming in with additional definitions and analogies. It became so complex that I requested Ligia document this by email. She did. And so I now present to you:

The AdWords Relationship Theory

Many clients complain that AdWords is too complicated. We also know that most people (advertisers or not, single or committed) complain that relationships are too complicated.
The following descriptions can help you understand how to run a successful AdWords campaign and/or relationship. Therefore, it can potentially help anyone.

Impressions:
Impressions are crucial, especially first impressions. Do your best to not act mentally insane during your first date, even if you are. Do not share immediately that you love to cross-dress on the weekends, dissect living butterflies, or worse, own a Celine Dion CD.

Clicks:
If things go well, there there should be a 'click'. Congratulations! But it's not over yet - now you have to work hard to keep your rejection rate at low levels.

Quality Score:
Quality score plays a very important role in where you stand in relation to the others. Nobody knows exactly how it's calculated, but many factors are taken into consideration: age, height, attractiveness, career, intelligence, humor, overlapping interests, kindness, and general cleanliness.

Search & Content:
Active searching is good, but only reaches 10% of all inventory. Therefore, you have to trust the power of the content network. We all know other people that can put us in contact with relevant audience. Hopefully some of these partners or friends are high-quality. If you don't have any high-quality direct connections, that's ok – you can rely on contextual targeting. This works by choosing to appear on a theme that relates your audience. If you go to the Reserva Cultural book store on a Sunday afternoon, for example, you're targeting intellectual types. On the other hand, if you go to a soccer game, you're destined to meet sports fans.

Phone Support:
Men always request phone support, but getting the number may not be easy. It's certainly not given away freely. But should the two people have a connection, he will be promptly greeted by a friendly voice that will be happy to answer any questions he may have. A guy may also try to get information about other products, the most common being Gmail.

Monthly Budget:
Your budget basically defines how often you can go out to look for your "ads". Our system can recommend a budget, but you won't be able to change it – unless you are promoted or win the lottery.

With standard delivery, the monthly budget will be distributed evenly over the month. If you have $400 to spend per month, you will spend approximately $100 per week. In contrast, you can also go with the accelerated delivery and spend the entire budget in one single night. The choice of accelerated delivery increases with alcohol.

Image Ads:

You want a good-looking ad. Image matters. And, oh, so does the size.

Editorial Policy - Inaccurate Ad Text:
Unfortunately, the information given in the ad text can be completely wrong. He said he was 29 years old, a successful neurosurgeon who graduated from MED-USP (top medical school in Brazil), and loves to play tennis. After a couple of days, you find out that he is in fact not quite old enough to legally drink, still in college but planning on applying to med school, and the only thing he plays is beer pong and video games.

Ad Rotation:
Since the start date of your marketing campaign, you have always used the same ad. You think it's good. Actually, you think it's perfect for you. But how can you be so sure, if you have never tried a different one? Therefore, it's better to test different ad text to see which one performs better. Over time, you'll automatically see the one with better performance more often.

Seasonal Campaigns:
Dating can be considered a seasonal business. There are times of the year that are naturally more conducive to this purpose, like wild New Year's Eve or Carnaval. With that said, you might want to save some money for a seasonal campaign, targeted to party-central areas like Rio de Janeiro or Bahia.

Specific Keywords:
To increase your chances of finding exactly what you're looking for and increasing your ROI (return-on-investment), use specific keywords. If you search for "interesting" guys, you may find broad interpretations of interesting. You're likely to get many prospects, but no conversions. Therefore, we recommend using more targeted, multi-word keywords, such as "interested in arts and literature" or "enjoys traveling on his yacht."

Specific Keywords:
You can benefit from including negative keywords to avoid matches that are irrelevant or unlikely to convert, such as:
–smoker

–drug addict

–gay

–married

–emotionally unavailable

Editorial Policy - Superlatives and Comparative Claims:
If the guy says he is the best in this or better than someone else in that, look for third-party support immediately. Believe it or not, guys lie…

Invalid Clicks:
Our advanced system will automatically filter out users with unethical behavior. However, if you discover that the same IP address has clicked multiple times on your ad, but the motive is suspect, feel free to use the IP exclusion tool.

And there you have it. We agreed we should could make tons of money by writing a book...using AdWords to market it, of course.

Back to the Buenos Aires trip. As the photo album I posted earlier proves, Betsy dragged me into doing a bus tour. I felt like an old lady. A lesbian old lady, actually, since the tour bus driver originally seemed to think Betsy & I were a couple. Each family or couple is given one souvenir book about the lovely cosmopolitan city to share. Our driver yelled back at us, in front of everyone, "They told me you're separate, so you get two books." Why she felt like she had to make a point of this I don't know.

So we passed the metal flower sculpture that closes at night and opens in the morning, the beautiful Santo Domingo church in San Telmo, and the cathedral of Buenos Aires. This cathedral was especially interesting because it bore graffitti all over the front, sprayed there by people protesting the 30,000 people who disappeared. The church didn't kidnap them, but apparently they didn't do anything about it either. It reminded me of Martin Luther King Jr.'s stance in his Letter From a Birmingham jail: if you're not doing something to help, you're part of the problem. The church said wait, change will come, and he said "action delayed is action denied."

We also enjoyed the La Boca district, with its colorful houses and street musicians. The 9th of July Ave. is another must-see attraction. Although it's just a street, it happens to be the widest one in the world, forcing you wait in the middle and walk two rounds of pedestrian lights before safely crossing.

So while I wasn't thrilled about the bus tour initially, it was certainly educational and I was glad I did it. How else would I have known that the colors of the Argentina flag are inspired by the sky?

But my favorite education was the liquid kind - the most delicious drink ever created, thanks to the Hilton. I like beer, love wine and cherish mojitios, but this...this was magical. I wanted my Moon Bay drink to never end. According to the bartender, it was just Baileys, cinnamon, & citric syrup. Seems a little too simple. But singer Tristan Prettyman would say, "simple as it should be."