Google Ads and Catholic Formation

Hello:

I haven't spoken much about cycling or my writing projects lately. Mostly because I haven't done much of either. I will be doing a 40 mile ride this Sunday and I'm telling myself that I'll get up early tomorrow and work on my writing. I know that I'll do the ride (friends won't make that optional) but I'm worried about the writing. This weekend I'll have my OCD finely tuned to a new Google advertising campaign we turned on Friday morning. This is only the second time we've tried Google ads and I'm anxious to see what kind of response we get. You can watch the results in near real time (about a 3 hour lag) and if I'm not careful I can easily find myself hitting the refresh button like it's a slot machine. It's tough to write the new must-read novel when you keep flipping screens to hit refresh.

For our first Google campaign I focused on And God Said, Play Ball!
Amusing and Thought-Provoking Parallels Between the Bible and Baseball by Gary Graf. It's proven to be a popular gift book that I could tie to common key words like "Bible" and "Baseball". I let the ad run for about a week and only spent about $90. The ad ran more than 60,000 times and several hundred people actually visited the e-commerce site as a result. We didn't actually sell any of the book as a result of the ad though.

This time, we are featuring a set of our more "Bread and Butter" titles called Journey of Faith. The series deals with educational materials for RCIA programs (Adult Catholic Formation), basically the curiculum for adults studying to join the Catholic Church (frequently because they are marrying a Catholic). The search keywords are pretty specific (RCIA, Adult Catholic Formation, etc) so I'm hoping that any clicks we get will be better qualified than those who were searching on baseball. Liguori Publications has a strong reputation for formation materials so that should help.

If I stop writing now, this post will be of reasonable length. Tune in tomorrow when I will probably be whining about how I haven't gotten any writing done.

Peace,

P. Del Ricci

PS - Please visit Network for Good to see how you can help those affected by hurricane Katrina.

[01/04/06 - We have sold out of the hardback version of And God Said, Play Ball! Amusing and Thought-Provoking Parallels Between the Bible and Baseball by Gary Graf. We have replaced it with a paperback version. I wish we had this problem more often. Feel free to read a sample chapter P. Del Ricci ]