Assorted Afflatuses

Three days on, my Google AdWords campaign has netted me a whopping one click. And no, that is not a typo. Of the 1,992 people in the Portland, OR area who have seen my lovely little text ads to promote my business venture, just one has actually clicked through to visit my company's website. I have endlessly tweaked keywords and exclusionary keywords to no avail. Google searchers, it seems, just do not care about my advertisements.

So I asked myself, "Where else do people 'hang out' online?" MySpace came to mind first, but the idea of supporting such a terrible service and its owner, the infamous News Corporation, deterred me. Facebook, on the other hand, is the clean, high-net-worth alternative to the somewhat dodgy slum that is MySpace. And, as a Facebook user, I have noticed the slick little text advertisements that pop up on the left side of the screen.

A little exploration took me to the Facebook Flyers page, which allows one to purchase advertisements both on a per-impression and a per-click basis. Curiously, though, the per-click system does not allow advertisers to specify which networks or groups see the ads, while the per-impression system does. It seems like a waste to advertise my small business, which operates only in the Portland, OR area, to every Facebook user in the United States. Admittedly, I have a great deal of exposure — in the first minute Facebook displayed my ad to over 2,000 sets of eyes — but it strikes me as extremely inefficient not to offer locally targeted advertisements.

Nonetheless, I have much higher hopes for the Facebook campaign. In the first fifteen minutes of its existence, three people have already clicked through.