The perils of advertising

So, I've been trying to use three different services to promote The Valkyrie.

I started with Project Wonderful. Lots of pageviews, and, because I see immediate response, I can determine which of their available places are high value for me, or low-value for me, given their relative cost. I think that I can safely attribute some sales to Project Wonderful.

I added a Facebook ad, and I've definitely gotten a few people's interest through that. They've liked the Edda-Earth Facebook page, for which I thank them (Whee!), and I saw a sales uptick.

Last week, I saw an ad for Google AdWords, stating that if you used $25.00 of advertising by January 2, you'd get $75 of free advertising. I figured that this was as good an idea as any.

I started with their provided keywords. Which included Kindle, ebooks, ebooks for sale. I added fantasy, sciience fiction, history, valkyrie (duh), etc.

Valkyrie, the title of the book, only rates a 5/10 of "relevance" as a keyword, in their analytics, incidentally. It's only garnered one click so far.

Since the book is about gods, Norse ones at that, I figured I'd try "Thor, Odin, Loki, and Tyr" as keywords.

"Your ad is not running because you are using trademarked words."

Um. Okay. Those are in the public domain, Google, because there was an entire culture and religion that revolved around them, long before Marvel existed.

Let's try "indie author."

"Your ad is not running because you are using trademarked words."

How on earth is 'indie author' trademarked? Fine. We'll go back to one of the terms you recommended for me, Google. Kindle. It got a click before. . . .

"Your ad is not running because it uses a term and a landing page similar to another ad that has a better ad quality." (I.e., the person running it, is paying more.)

So about 95% of my clicks, given that most of the time, my ad can't *run* because of "low ad quality" (predetermined by how much they think the relevance of my keywords are. . . and again, Valkyrie, the title of the book, only nets a 5/10 quality in their mind), seem to come not from the "Search Network," but from the "Display network." For whatever that is worth.

In the meantime, advertising at a browser-based game on Project Wonderful has netted me over four hundred clicks, some repeats, most not.

So I am not entirely sure if Google AdWords has any value for me, seeing as they seem entirely unable to run my ad, no matter what my daily budget is.