Is it OK to Capitalize on God? Yes: But You’d Better be GOOD at It!

I ran a little ad campaign tied to keyword “God” linked back to just this lousy landing page from a few days ago.

Google’s system is fair, and early in the game, “God” could be had fairly cheaply. $.25 a click for God. That’s not freaking bad man –for GOD!

But this God is fair and just and so is Google. People think some of the ways Google adwords work is nefarious. Those people are DOPES, do not listen to them. Google just works very well and is set up to constantly be optimizing on its own. .Here’s how it works: it can calculate the performance of your ad. If my ad tied to God resulted in clicks where every click left the page pretty much immediately (which was the case in over 80% of the instances), Google views that as a “low quality” ad. Here’s what happens as a result: the cost of the keyword gets jacked up. What happens then? Well then what happened is the campaign stopped.

It’s a good system. People don’t want to be paying for lousy ads (even @ .25/click) and moreover, Google wants ITS users to get good results. If its users continually click on your ad and then bail immediately, your ad (in this case my ad) isn’t giving Google users what they want. Google wants to continually optimize to produce better results (period), this sort of optimization is good for everyone.

For purposes of experiment, I don’t mind blowing $20 to see how it works. But how it works is because the site they landed on was not what the people who clicked wanted –and I could’ve experimented around with landing pages to see if one without a picture of Paris Hilton would’ve done better – is Google deems the ad “low quality”. Google will let you run low quality ads, even for God, but, there’s a price premium. In my case a 25X price premium! That’s right, because my ad was lousy they jacked up the CPC on God to $5. That is a CPC that is outside the bounds of what I am doing here (which is trying to learn and satisfy my own curiosity). I’m $.25/click curious, but not $5/click curious

I could have started over and had God at $.25 again, and when I create some content that would likely please God (and Google) for $.25 I may try again. For now,I think this system works really, really well. For you, for me, for Google – and maybe even for God.