The Science of Managing Search Ads

A colleague forwarded me an article about Google AdWords from the NY Times. I especially liked this part, "For more than one million businesses, Google’s search advertising system is like a hose inundating Web sites with traffic. Managing it effectively, though, is as much art as it is science. It requires a mix of analytics and gamesmanship, a combination of skills that has become vitally important in the Internet age."

You know I agree with this and liken pay per click advertising to commodities trading. Not that I've done commodities trading personally - but there's bidding and competition and risk and return, so there's definitely similarities.

I've got the sense that most of 2009 was like a hose innundating me with information, traffic, decisions.

The intersection of art and science, gamesmanship and analytics at the tip of a firehose - what a place to be!