Google Adwords Jumpstart Review

Posted by Siddharth Rao
May 4, 2009

Greetings from Siddharth Rao’s blog! While I’m still trying to catch up with all the backlog of work I’ve managed to pile up (thanks to my 5-week India vacation) – it looks like my blog has been spotted by a few BIGTIME spammers! The “Lead Evolution Review” post that I did a couple of months ago seem to have been added to some automated blog-commenting software – being used by several “grey-hat” and “black-hat” search engine optimization people/companies. I get an average of about 70 spam comments each day – most of them being link-backs to those weight-loss/acai berry scam sites, porn sites or some freaking stupid site with tags like “swine flu”, etc. I think it’s about time I have to look into some good semi-automated spam filters for Wordpress.

Anyway, today I’m going to write a detailed review about the “Google Jumpstart” program – which I participated a few months ago. I had mentioned about getting a call from Google™ recommending the “Jumpstart” program in a blog post that I made in November 2008. It’s now time to write a detailed review about this program. FYI - Google™ has disabled any direct links to this program information page and they only choose advertisers manually on some criteria; and contact them asking if they will be interested in participating their program.

I enrolled in this program and Google™ assigned a dedicated account manager for me. I was given direct access to this point of contact via email or phone. The main job of this account manager was to help me analyze my site, take my input on what areas / products / pages of my site am I trying to get most of the traffic and then research to find out how to use the Google™ Adwords™ program to strategically bid on keywords that can get highly targeted traffic to these pages and help me achieve my “conversion goals”. Conversion goals means the percentage of visitors to my site who convert into potential “customers” for products/services offered by my partner merchants/retail merchants listed on my site.

Yes – for those who understand what this means, it does sound like “WOW”. However, after participating in it and putting close to $2000 as test money into the program, I’ve had mixed results. I’m going to list the points that I observed as a part of my experience in a bulleted form and provide my review on it.

  1. Interaction / communication: The Jumpstart team and the personnel at Google™ are very good at interacting and communicating business needs and goals with their clients. I recall having two weekly meetings, constant follow-up via email, seeking feedback and acting on the feedback provided.
  2. Main focus & Deficiency: As per my experience, I found out that there was an offset in focus as far as business goals are concerned – which was the main reason why I or my site did not have a high success rate with this program. I personally feel that Google™ focuses on getting more “clicks” rather then getting “higher targeted convertible clicks”. Often, the searches performed by Internet users or visitors are classified into three types: “Browse”, “Compare” and “Buy”. Based on these three types, we can roughly estimate the mindset and the stage in which this user is trying to seek information. People in the browse stage will use very broad search terms because they just want to get first-hand information on a particular product or service. On the contrary, a person who is ready to buy a product will search a much targeted keyword string with the brand, model number/name and with words like “purchase” in the search string. Obviously, the number of searches occurring in the “buy” stage will be much lesser compared to “Browse” and “Compare” type searches. Having said that, lesser the search – lesser the number of clicks we would get if we bid on that keyword for displaying our ad on Google™. Now as a site owner I would indeed be more concerned and interested to raise my conversion ratio rather then just getting non-targeted traffic. However, Google™ does concentrate on getting more “clicks” for obvious reasons. More clicks means more money to them. There were several instances where I had to try out a bunch of “compare” and even “browse” type keywords suggested by them for a few weeks; only to see that those keywords were just attracting clicks and costing me money but were not “converting” into customers at all. Eventually, I had to get back to my Account Manager and ask them to stop bidding on those keywords.
  3. Strengths / Positive Points: There were several benefits that I got by participating in this program. First of all, I could have a direct point of contact to call or email asking questions about so many Adwords™ related topics – which were vague and not clearly answered on most of the forums, Adwords™ Help Site, etc. So I had access to authentic and real information FAST. That was the biggest plus of this program. Secondly, I got to know some very important points about landing page “quality score”, ad writing “best practices”, so smart tips on using Google™ Adwords™ “Keyword Tool” for advanced keyword research, etc. I learnt a lot about using the Google™ Content Network and targeted placements for advertising image ads and getting reasonable qualified traffic from those channels. I also got an opportunity to be a member of the “Adwords™ Business Council” which allows me to be one of the first set of beta-testers and reviewers of new tools and features being developed by the Adwords™ Development Team.
  4. Conclusion: After using this program for almost 4+ months, I would say that I am reasonably satisfied with the results that I got out of it. Although I did not make huge profits or anything of that sort, I indeed learnt quite a few interesting things, which I can now apply and improve my advertising campaign results in terms of customer reach and profitability. So I will definitely recommend this program to anyone who has a mid-level to large web site or portal, which either sells products/services directly (ecommerce) or simply runs a large affiliate business involving several retail/brand merchants and their respective products / services.

That’s my 2-cents on the Google™ Jumpstart Program. Anyone who has similar or contrasting views is free to comment on this blog (except spammers). And here’s a sneak-peak on what’s lined up for the next 2-3 months:

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