Naming characters with Google AdWords

This would be an interesting way to choose a startup name. E-mail gathering splash-page targeted to keywords within your industry.<p>[Name 1] - The service that helps you [solution to problem].<p>[Name 2] - The service that helps you [solution to problem].<p>[Name 3] - The service that helps you [solution to problem].

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.<p>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).

I'm no detective, but here are some of the names:<p><pre><code> Annabel Strange Annabel Spring Annabel Sketch Annabel Scrape Annabel Start</code></pre>

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.

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

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.

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.

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.