I would like to share with you my first experience with Google AdWords.
I divided this post in three parts. The first part regards the building of the campaign; this section presents the analysis of the results; the third is dedicated to the conclusion.

Let’s start from the “big” numbers.
I remind you that:
-  the AD in English has been created the 22/12/09 and the Ad in French the 16/01/2010.
 - I left Google Adwords ‘free’ to manage the Bid and the Networking.

tab1 - Impressions and Clicks of the Campaign

Tab1 reports  the result of the campaign (so the sum of the Ad in French and the Ad in English).  It’s very clear that:
- the importance of the Content (Network) is practically ten time bigger that the Search (Network).
- The CTR (Click through rate) of the Search is twice the CTR of the Content.
- The Ad in French (despite it was introduced later) received about 20 more time clicks than the Ad in English.
- The Content of the English AD didn’t bring any click.
- For the French Ad the importance of Content is 6 time bigger than the importance of Search.

What is the Content and what is the Search?
The Search (Network) is a large group of websites (including Google itself). In this network the ads are targeted based on a user’s search terms. For example, if you search for “Italian coffee” on Google, you’ll see related coffee ads next to the search results. On Google, ads appear alongside or above the search results.
The Content (Network) is a large group of websites (including Google itself). In this network the ads are targeted based on content themes rather than specific keywords.

tab2 - Comparison of Cicks towards Visit

OK. From tab1 data it looks like the importance of Content for this experience is much bigger than Research but all that glitters is not gold.
Let’s look to the easy but interesting statistic of tab2: the total click reported in AdWords and the total visit reported in Google Analytics. It’s clear that there is a big difference (75%) between these two numbers. Other users experienced this difference and reported it in  the forum of Google

There is still a quite hot discussion about the difference between clicks and visit from Adwords also in different forum .
From what I understood of this discussion, the difference is explained by one or by a combination of these variables:
-  The visitor might have browser set up that doesn’t allow Google Analytics to track the visit;
-   The visitor stops to load the page before tracking code is fully loaded.
-  The landing page might have installed the tracking code in a wrong way
-   The member of the Source or Content networking is tricking (fake advertisement).
For this experience, I can exclude the third possibility. For sure I cannot check neither the web browser setting of the visitor either if he stopped to load the page before he could be tracked as a visit.

tab3 - Clicks from Content and Search for the AD in French

Thanks to the good reports generator  of Google I can look closely to the Source and Content network that Google selected for this campaign.
For this analysis I will consider only the statistics for the AD in French language.  The first strange data is that in the first 4 days of the campaign the 31% of all clicks come from just a web site of the Content.  Guess what; this web site is fake. 

 I have made a very personal analysis of all web sites belonging to the Content for which there was at least one click. Nothing scientific, of course. I classified them in 9 categories (personal judgment); the category “parked domain” is coming from AdWords 

tab4 - Personal classification of Content Web Sites

I gave them a weight from 1 to 10 (where 1 is no interesting and 10 very interesting) based on different (subjective) elements (type of web site, country of origin of the visitor, possibility that a reseller visit it, etc) and a ‘market value’ (I used website outlook) I defined ‘fake’  all the web sites where I think the Ad was never showed or clicked by a “true” reseller.  I am very surprised that in Adwords there is no the possibility to submit quickly “fake” web sites to the attention of Google for further analysis.
What surprised me was not so much the high number of ‘fake’ web site (and the high number of clicks my Ad received from them) but the fact that some of them still receive a market value. This means that they have been generating traffic from quite a long time.

Are you still with me? Last effort.  I am going to present a summary of the result for the Key words (99) that I used.

tab5 - Statistics on the Key Words of the AD in French

Once explained some terms, the table is self explaining.
Define  Low search volume keywords is quite straight  forward. are keywords that are associated with very little search traffic on Google properties. In which case, they suspend your keyword. This status is only temporary and these keywords will be reactivated if they find that they could start delivering traffic.
The AdWords system calculates a ‘Quality Score’ for each of your keywords. It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query. A keyword’s Quality Score is frequently updated and is closely related to its performance. In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).
The formula behind Quality Score varies depending on whether it’s affecting ads on Google and the search network or ads on the content network. 
‘Average position’ is a statistic attributed to each of your keywords. It refers to the average position on a search result page in which an ad appears when it’s triggered by that keyword.
’1′ is the highest position on the first page of search results. There is no ‘bottom’ position. Keywords with an average position of 1 to 8 generally trigger ads on the first page of search results. Keywords with an average position of 9 to 16 generally trigger ads on the second page and so on.

tab6 - Google Ad rank

 Average position is a statistic related to the Search pages. A similar but more general concept is the rank of the AD.  To understand tab5 this concept is not necessary but to understand the link between AD Rank, Quality Score and Bid  is essential to improve the result of your campaign.
It helped me to put in graphic form the explanation offered by Google (tab6). 

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What’s more?