Scott Bush

Last Monday I reaped one of the rewards of corporate employeeship: attendance at a company-paid educational seminar. I’m only being half facetious. The opportunity to learn or hone a skill on company time and dime really is a win-win. The employee gains insight, skills, and techniques while the company has a more effective (and happier) employee.

So the scene is set for my drive to one unremarkable hotel ballroom near SeaTac airport for “Google AdWords Seminars for Success.” It was an all-day event designed for beginner- to intermediate level AdWord practitioners. The class’s topics included an introduction to AdWords, step-by-step account setup and management, how to bid, basic SEO techniques, and an introduction to Google’s other bid to control all of teh intarwebs, Google analytics. It was a very busy day but surprisingly, I found it all useful.

Some of the topics of note included the ability to display image- and video ads on the AdSense network. (AdSense is the program where website owners opt to display “Ads by Google” on their site in exchange for a portion of the revenue generated by those ads.) You can also geographically target ads, so that the ad you’re running is only displayed to people in, say, the U.S.; or just Washington state; or even a particular city. You cannot (yet) target zip codes, but you can define an area by geographical coordinates (somewhat like an image map for those of you who coded HTML back in the mid-to late-90s). Of course, geo-targeting is based primarily on where your IP address is registered; Google doesn’t really know where you are. That’s another reason not to love AOL (as if you needed more). All AOL IP addresses are shown to generate from West Virginia, so if you dial up or connect to broadband provided by AOL, those “find sexy singles in [city]” ads will advertise Reston or Manassas even though you’re in Seattle or elsewhere. There are some mitigating factors that the instructor glossed over, such as logging into Google or other sites where you identify your location. I’m sure there’s a lot more to that process than she understood and it was well beyond the scope of the class.

One thing to note: I got a fat pen bearing Google’s logo (just stylized text) down the side. What’s strange to me was the little clip also bore the URL “www.google.com” Why?! If you can’t figure out where Google’s website is then you have other issues. It’s like Burger King stating “We sell burgers.” (Please don’t construe this analogy as me advocating in any way that you should actually ingest anything from Burger King.)