I've been reviewing two excellent resources that came out of Google Grants for setting up and managing AdWords campaigns (the account creation and ongoing management guides). The resources are targeted at non-profits, but they're written at a level that could work for most small businesses I know.

But, there's a problem: both guides assume that the real value of using a pay-per-click system like AdWords is readily apparent to advertisers.

In my experience, it is not. Most organizations start to use AdWords with the idea that it will increase traffic to their sites (often true) with all sorts of business benefits then automatically ensuing (almost never true). To get at the real value of AdWords, you have to understand search marketing as a two stage process:

• Acquisition
• Conversion

AdWords is all about acquiring visitors. Conversion is about getting them to achieve some goal on your site. The key missing point for most advertisers is that how they acquire customers almost directly dictates what they have to do to convert them. Specifically, the page advertisers are driving visitors to with search advertising has to reflect a continuation of what the customer was promised in the advertisement that took them there.

When advertisers don't get this, and most don't, search advertising just becomes an expensive way to acquire visitors, only a small percentage of which become customers. From there, it's not long until the advertisers abandon search advertising.

That's all I have to say for now. I tend to think you have to tune the acquisition and conversion processes separately, keeping one or the other fixed. But that's fodder for another post.

n.b. To be fair to the professionals at Google Grants, I think they have a good idea of the issues I describe here. They just have not written the guide for how to solve them. Nobody has. It's a hard topic and often depends very much on the non-profit's specific business objectives.