

Naming characters with Google AdWords - erikwiffin
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/robinsloan/robin-writes-a-book-and-you-get-a-copy/posts/1210

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JayNeely
This would be an interesting way to choose a startup name. E-mail gathering
splash-page targeted to keywords within your industry.

[Name 1] - The service that helps you [solution to problem].

[Name 2] - The service that helps you [solution to problem].

[Name 3] - The service that helps you [solution to problem].

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ig1
He's doing it wrong, if you look at the impressions he's got adwords set so
that if a keyword is doing well it gets more impressions. That's the wrong way
to do this set, you have to configure it to give each keyword equal coverage.

Otherwise what happens is that by pure randomness some of your keywords are
going to get less clicks than others, and as soon as that happens to one of
your keywords they get "frozen" (i.e. they get no more ad impressions so they
get stuck at their "random" low value).

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byoung2
I'm no detective, but here are some of the names:

    
    
      Annabel Strange
      Annabel Spring
      Annabel Sketch
      Annabel Scrape
      Annabel Start

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defen
Did you de-obfuscate the text, run the searches, or use some other mechanism?
I didn't find anything when running the searches and don't really have the
time to mess with de-obfuscation

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byoung2
I Googled "She's the Sherlock Holmes for the 21st century", and that gave me 3
pages of sites that were displaying the ad when they were indexed.

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goodkarma
LOL who would have thought Google would have indexed ask.com pages showing
their own Adwords ads!

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stingraycharles
It's the ultimate form of "eating your own dogfood".

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hristov
That is actually a pretty clever way to do quick and cheap marketing research.
However, not a good way to write a novel. To all aspiring writers: please do
not base your novel on marketing research, if I wanted that I would be
watching TV.

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byrneseyeview
If the author had A/B tested the headline, it probably would have gotten more
clicks as "Naming characters _in a novel_ ". The way it reads now, it sounds
like something about using non-ASCII symbols in Adwords.

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JayNeely
People who are familiar with that definition for "characters" probably aren't
the audience he was thinking of. =)

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goodkarma
Tim Ferriss gives a good example of this in the book Four Hour Work Week, when
he discusses how he used Adwords to pick the book name.

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imp
You have to be careful when doing this not to violate Google's TOS. I don't
think they like people using AdSense just for "market research" because the
users who actually click on the link get taken to a useless landing page.
Unless he had a pre-order form for the book as the landing page, that's not
generally accepted. I know Tim Ferris kind of popularized that technique, but
if all of Google's Ads lead people to worthless landing pages, their CTR
across the network would go down. Just an FYI for those who can't afford to
get a Google Ban because they also rely on AdSense.

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tjic
> Unless he had a pre-order form for the book as the landing page, that's not
> generally accepted.

This sounds like an assertion with no real knowledge to back it up.

What does "generally" mean?

Either it's acceptable or it's not.

Here are the adwords TOS:

[http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?page=guid...](http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?page=guidelines.cs)

This may be what you're thinking of:

[http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?page=guid...](http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?page=guidelines.cs&topic=16862&subtopic=16864)

 _Your ads and keywords must directly relate to the content on the landing
page for your ad. When users see your ad, they should be able to understand
what kind of product, service, or other content they will find on your site.
Products or services promoted in your ad must be reflected on your landing
page; ads can be disapproved if a promoted product is not offered or available
for sale as promised._

The ad doesn't promise that anything is for sale - it seems like a general
branding campaign.

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imp
Yeah, that must have been what I read and extrapolated a bit.

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mojonixon
Why do some of the ads get run more often than others? Seems like google would
run the one with the highest click through rate more often. I'm not convinced
all of these are statistically significant anyway, but I don't have R at the
moment.

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byoung2
There is a setting in Adwords for "rotate my ads evenly over time" that is
necessary for accurate A/B testing. By default, Google shows the ads with the
highest click rate more often, so you'll get a bias.

