Prayga finally accepted defeat and passed me on to Matt at Google Adwords Express who assured me 'he had my best interests at heart'. In the end, after much haranguing, he offered to take down the Adwords Express ad - especially after I queried the fact that apparently, the end date isn't the end date of your Adwords account.
If you've set the budget for the month, Google will continue to spend it if, 'the system feels that the clicks accrued will be valid and helps you generate business.' I'm quoting Matt directly here. So, if there's money in the budget and 'the system feels' (a worryingly Orwellian term) that the clicks you're getting are good for you, then google will keep spending it. That's not the sort of control I'm prepared to give up.
So what have we learned from my little experiment with Google Adwords Express...?
Well, there are a number of concerns with this model, and it's probably not worth your time going into all of them here. The main problems with Adwords Express are these:
1. It's designed for people who don't want to work out how to use normal adwords. Therefore it sets lots of its own parameters for you and gives the advertiser very little scope to nuance their campaign.
2. As we've established, because it's linked to Google Places, it default targets geographically to your location, even if that's not where you want to advertise.
3. It's massively expensive compared to normal adwords. CPC for my campaign was more than 3 times my usual spend and the targetting was so blunt that the responders were largely useless.
4. You can't control it from your normal adwords dashboard. You have to sign into your Express account through the Google Places portal. The results are shown on your Adwords Dashboard but there's very little you can change from there - certainly not the budget!
5. Once established, the budget is set and cannot be reduced below a certain threshold. So you're tied into spending money even if the campaign doesn't work.
I'm no expert of the wonders of everything Google and some of the mistakes I made as a regular user of adwords, are the same ones many businessmen will also make. In essence, it's a clumsy tool that needs a lot of work from the Google development team before it becomes a viable option to normal adwords for most small businesses.
Better to stick to adwords and finesse the campaigns you have now to ensure better bang for your buck. Google Adwords is misfiring all over the place.
If you want a hand setting up your Adwords campaign why not drop us a line at DavisDavis Advertising in Folkestone. We'll be happy to help.
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