Google AdWords as Greeting Cards

Oh this was going to be such a clever idea and it does work. Kinda.

Google’s AdWords, is an ad service offered by Google whereby you “you create your own ads, choose keywords to help us match your ads to your audience and pay only when someone clicks on them.” The ads can appear when you do a Google search, browse GMail, or anywhere else that Google’s near ubiquitous ads appear. So if you create an ad with the keyword “kittens” it should appear whenever you’re looking at a web page that Google determines is primarily about kittens. Neat eh?

Then I started thinking… When I told my wife I was going to redesign my site she asked, “Why, so you can tell everyone what a wonderful person I am?” Well, no, but she is a wonderful person and so I thought, how cool would it be to create an AdWords ad and have her Google the magic phrase which would bring up my message of undying love or something like that. My plan solidified as I rode home from work today.

Setting up an AdWords account costs $5. And the ads themselves don’t cost a thing unless they are clicked on. This price is determined by you. Basically you tell Google how much you’re willing to pay for the click and you’re ad is ranked according to this amount. This can be as little as $0.01, but $0.10 or more typically if you want Google to even bother. So, I got my ad ready to go and chose several phrases that I wanted to trigger the ad. Unfortunately the only one that seemed to work somewhat regularly was To My Wife. I was really hoping to use The Best Wife, but keyword phrase didn’t seem to want to trigger my ad.

So, now I had everything set up and ready to go, albeit with a less than ideal search phrase. I called Susie over to the computer and said “Hey, look what happens when I search for this”, typed in my phrase and… nothing. So I put it in quotes, tried it again and voila. At first she didn’t notice but I gently suggested she check out the ads where she saw:

She looked at me with an expression that said both, “Aw that’s sweet” and “Now what have you done”.

But then she clicked the ad which took her to a page where I describe just how much she means to me. She was quite touched I think… until she saw the picture (you’ll know it when you see it), at which point she lost it and we both began laughing uncontrollably.

If you’d like to see the tribute to my wonderful wife you can try the Google thing (assuming the ad is still running), or you can save me a nickel and follow the link: To Sue.