Last Friday the Hello Viking team immersed ourselves in a 14-hour Google Adwords training session. Search history. Platforms. Tools. Keyword research practice. Ad-writing. Negative filtering. The works. We had 10 people sitting around the table——no one was excused.

Anyone who has dabbled in search marketing knows how managing a single PPC campaign without proper guidance can prove endless, and create some severe dark circles under the eyes.

Search is the great marketing equalizer. It’s also a ruthless gauntlet for copywriters and strategists.

So what did we learn?

That there’s a lot to learn, and the rules are changing fast.

Running effective search marketing and Adwords campaigns takes hours of swimming through competitor keywords, bidding, adjusting pricing, tweaking, launching, optimizing a quality score and of course, brewing a really big pot of coffee.

We’d run our fair share of Adwords campaigns before the training, so we had a lot of questions for Rodrigo Stockebrand, our trainer. Questions like, how can an Adwords campaign support an existing product line or marketing initiative? Why do some users pay so much per click for high volume search terms when others pay next to nothing? How can you leverage negative filters, geo-targeting and exact versus broad match to deliver useful consumer research, as well as effective placements?

Nevermind the whole realm of integrating the work you do in AdWords with custom landing pages and SEO.

14 hours is a long time.

The discussion was thorough, and fascinating. The art of running Adwords is in the details. It rewards the mind of a math wonk mixed with a copywriter mixed with a programmer mixed with a statistician.

Armed with new knowledge, we’re looking forward to further incorporating and acknowledging Adwords campaigns with all of our clients.