Just saw this forum/post so thought I'd throw my $0.02 in.

I work in online advertising strategy.. you can use Google Adlytics - built into AdWords, to project monthly impressions, clicks, CTRs and budgets.

For the words you listed, you need to use a lot more than just those you selected and cast a wider net. As you track conversions, you can become more efficient and narrow down the keywords you use. Most of your traffic will come from branded search terms like 'carrion fields' but I don't expect you to get any mileage out of 'carrion' or 'fields' by themselves.. from a user perspective, it is not logical to correlate the game to either of these words.

I'm sure you have something on the site like Hitwise to track site stats, but toss in pixels from Google Analytics to a bunch of different entry points (like Homepage, New Player Forum, Registration Completion) so Google can optimize there. For one of you coder junkies, there's a way to turn the Google tracking pixel to fire off a click so you can track people that hit 'play now' though they'll probably be low. I imagine you guys have some way to tie IPs of website visits to telnet login.

If you're looking to save money, pay for direct match and avoid paying for misspellings like 'carroin fields' or 'musd.' People that search for CF will find it if they want to in the organic listings (non paid).

Make sure to have multiple creatives in market and see which convert better - then optimize as necessary. Words like 'free' get lost in a text ad so I'd recommend focusing more on the immediate user benefit (immerse yourself, etc..) than the game mechanics (free).

Spend an hour in Photoshop putting together a banner ad to run in Google's content network (these are the ads that show up on Dioxide's). It's more expensive for a reason - users have learned to ignore text in content areas. If you go down this road, you can probably exclude www.qhcf.net from the reach your banners will receive :-).

One final note is that online advertising is very math based, because everything is trackable and is a data point. Your online strategy is supposed to learn from itself month over month as you study numbers and trends.. so, you can feel comfortable investing more in the beginning knowing that it will inform greater efficiencies and less spend month after month. From an effectiveness perspective online:

word of mouth > search > affiliate > banner

.. so if you're trying to figure out how to spend your marketing budget, the above tenets generally hold true. WOM you can't control, so really you're focusing on search, affiliate, and banner. Last point on this is that all 3 feed each other to create a halo effect - and this is something you need to determine through your analysis as to what the best marketing mix is.

Cheers,

-G.