Pictured is a screen shot of what is shaping up to be a very successful AdWords campaign on behalf of the Energy Action Coalition by students at Eastern Michigan University's College of Business. As illustrated in the graph at the top of the figure, the runaway success of the campaign has only become apparent in the last week.

We're approximately 7 weeks into the semester or our Google AdWords course, the half way point. At this stage, 50 students spread across to course sections have been working on Non-profit AdWords account for four weeks with differing levels of success. In all cases, the formula for AdWords success is simple: find things you provide that people want and then promise it to them. However, finding the match is difficult often requiring several iterations. Hence, the fact that it's only in the past week that you start to see real success in the Energy Action Coalition's campaign despite the fact that students had already been working assiduously on it for three weeks.

Here are some things that make AdWords campaigns difficult:

• How do people actually express their need for the things you provide? In particular, how would those needs be expressed as a query people would type into a search engine like Google?
  
•  How do you most effectively present your promised solution? What features of your products and services (yes, you can think of non-profit offerings this way) are the most attractive to searchers?
• People do not conduct web searchers to help you or your cause. They search to help themselves.
• People do not become significant donors or even necessarily volunteer on the basis of one Internet ad. Both tend to require significant levels of engagement. The ad can be used to initiate that engagement, but that is as far as it goes.
  

The challenges students faced with Energy Action coalition contained all of these elements plus features that were specific to the organization. I'll be talking about those in future posts.