Steer Clear of Google AdWords

[nickelbabe]

Especially if you get one of those "free £50" adwords intro offers.
I've been telling them no for months and months, but they kept grinding me down, so I thought "well, I'll take a punt, I can cancel it after the £50 has gone"

Well, no, actually you fucking can't!

When it was set up by the "lovely" lady in the call centre, she gave me basic guidelines, showed me where to look to see how much had been spent etc and how many "hits" I'd got.

Actually, as it turns out, what she failed to warn me was that the screen "that shows everything that's happened on the campaign" only shows the last 7 days, not the whole campaign.
I waited for this phone call after 10 days (which was a budget of £5 per day) and it never arrived.
The screen told me that I was on £36..., and I thought "oh, it hasn't gone up much this week, I must remember to cancel the campaign when it hits £48 ish.
Today, I looked again, though, it's very weird how it isn't going up very much at all, surrely the money is near its limits.
then I found out about the 7 days thing!
I managed to find a way to make it show me the whole campaign, and they've used £51.60 of my own money!!

I was definitely not going to continue after the £50 had gone because I'd had nothing through my website, even though lots of people had clicked on it. and now I find that it's cost me another £51.60 on top of that!!
I can't fucking afford to pay myself a wage, and I've been screwed out of 50quid by these shameful charlatans!

I spent about 20 minutes trying to find out how to cancel the campaign on their "help" screen, finally found out that you can't even cancel the campaign if you've only got one running -you have to cancel the whole account.
Which woud have been aproblem until I found out the scam they're pulling.

so this is how it goes:
force people to set up a campaign,
don't give them all the information they need to check the campaign out
make the Help screen fucking useless
make the Adwords website really hard to navigate
make it hard/impossible to cancel the account
don't ring back after the 10 days that you promised, because that's the best way to make sure that your customer spends more than they wanted to in the first place.

I cannot afford to spend £50 no something that has NO RETURN AT ALL.
I'm already struggling to pay the bills every month!

I'm warning you all, so that you don't fall into the same trap that I did.
I'm a fucking fool.

Adwords if fine if you play them back at their own game
for a start, go in and alter ALL your pay per click to 1p
at least then the bills will not rise any further

then do an advanced search on my posts on here about adwords (some without the 2 on the end of my name)
I believe all my posts on ebay have been time archived now
but it comes up on UKBF

adwords is GREAT - but it is just a tool, be a good workman and make it do what you want not what they want.

I have my bill down around £5 a MONTH
and get over 4000 impressions next to my organic searches - perfect

I have changed the max day to 1p and the per click to 1p.

I have done the cancel account thing, but I haven't recevied any confirmation, and I've also paused the campaign.

Annoyingly, they don't tell you that you can set it for a penny, otherwise i would have done. I got completely suckered in.

if you can, leave the campaign running - at 1p per click you'll get stuff all clicks
but you WILL get the impressions data
THEN you can start playing with it - one word at a time to aim for 4th or 5th position.
anything they ask for over 20p you are competing with the big boys - don't bother. set 17p and wait for their money to run out each night

often the stats will say - price too low to show - stick to your guns and magically the next day the price will be right!

think chess meets backgammon meets yoga - that is adword campaign management.
deeply addictive!!

I think i've already cancelled it! But I'll check today what's happening.

they set me up using an email address that the people advertising the free credit gave me, so I could always re-register with my own email address (whic hwill make using youtube easier!)

I've set up a new one with the 1p per click and my proper email address.

I'm using the ad from the other one as a guide, so I hope it works okay.

I notice that they told me to set a budget of £5 per day, but a lot of those days have got payments of more than £5.

nickel
IGNORE THEM
set your budget at £1 per day
default click at 5-6p
do not accept their advice on all your adwords - you know your business, they are trying to get you to sell more
start with keywords you KNOW will get you impressions
use your website tracking data to pick words
stuff like your website name, set at 2p per click - to drive the organic searches
then sit back and watch the data for a couple of weeks
you can have SEVERAL ads on one campaign - I have 6
the thing is to NOT let them bounce you :-)

I've used the key words from the last campaign that had clicks, and taken off those that didn't.
I've also added the town name as an extra keyword.

i've amended the daily budget to £1.

Thank you loads for all this advice, TP, this is one of those areas that I never expected to get into! :)

I spent about a year tinkering with my adwords - at least two or three hours a week
now its an hour a month just checking that all is OK
and they are a very useful advertising tool

feel free to come back with more questions - threads like this get a lot more lurkers than they do posters!

I will do.

I keep going back and checking stuff.
I need to familiarize myself with the layout of the site, and how to fiddle with stuff.
:)

interesting, I've just been onto A***n to check a status of a book, and there's a "sponsored link" to my site under the book.
That must be feeding through from adwords.
Didn't even think that might be a possibility!

yup - that comes under content searches - keep the price for them really low - say 1p - unless you are SURE that they turn into sales / proper enquiries

Content searches, right, that's logged. :)

Marking my place because I have been putting this to do job to the bottom of my list.

Tee hee

if the campaign is roughly costing what you want to spend
and roughly doing what you want
then just log in each day and start looking at the screens
familiarise yourself with the data over long and short term

for example
I have my campaign switched off between 1 am and 6 am as I got fed up with mad russians clicking on it!
words where my organic searches come up high I price low - to encourage free hits
words where I'm competing with the big boys I tweak to get outside the main track
DO use mis spellings
DO use lots of words at low prices to see if they come up as impressions and then decide if its worth bidding for clicks ...

I've increased my bids on the ones that have the highest impressions.

I like the idea of encouraging free clicks.

Hi TalkinPeace, I'm probably being really stupid but I can't find any of your detailed posts about AdWords on here, when I do a search I find a post when you refer to a (March) thread that you say is very useful, but i can't find the thread. Arrghhhh! Would you be able to link to it?

The thing is, I've just got a £75 AdWords voucher from my bank so was thinking of giving it a try. Do you have any tips (or any links to good articles/posts) for an absolute beginner?

For example, when you say "words where my organic searches come up high I price low - to encourage free hits", could you explain further - is there much benefit to doing adwords on keywords you're already on P1 for?

Nickelbabe thanks for posting - I'll now know about the last 7 days vs whole campaign thing, much appreciated!

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/freelancers/1176690-Help-please-Google-Yahoo-search-engine-advertising
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/freelancers/1185342-Facebook-Ads-anyone-done-this

Llanarth
what people search on to find your site is often not what you expect
BUT if there are terms where your own site comes high up on the organic searches reliably on different computers with and without cookies cleared, leave the adword live but price it low so that people click on the organic search rather than the paid one
oddly people find it reassuring to see both so it IS worth leaving theadword there

community.ebay.co.uk/topic/Business-Seller-Board/Ebay-Vs-Web/18000420994?#msg18006616030
community.ebay.co.uk/topic/Business-Seller-Board/Anybody-Understand-Google/2000049677?#msg2000380798
www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=83

thank you so much - I will read all those links and will ask if anything isn't clear - I really appreciate you taking the time to dig them up.

No worries.
I still have my own comfy chair on the Ebay business board
and I hang around near the door on UKBF most days

Thanks for all of this TalkinPeace2. I checked out all your links and found lots of useful stuff.

I can add that Women Unlimited have an amazing amount of good free advice womenunlimited.co.uk

I need to get back to Adwords NOW and check on the caps I set. I read somewhere you can set an end-date for your campaign, that should stop you spending too much nickelbabe.

Do come and check out my website if you like;) it's mumandcareer.co.uk and I could use some extra hits (for free!). I've got lots of tips for WAHM's here www.mumandcareer.co.uk/featured-2/

I tried Adwords - I might as well have flushed my money down the toilet.

There's some great, practical advice here but I think it's worth remembering that PPC produces around a 2% conversion rate - so what's your ROI when embarking on PPC campaigns? Especially for small biz/freelancers - how much time do you actually have to commit to getting your approach refined given this low conversion rate?

I work for a global company, and freelance consult to small businesses and it always needs hammering home to both that ROI must be worth it for all kinds of campaigns.

Given to really get it super refined, you need to be working off a master keyword list created from words YOU think people search on combined with words people ACTUALLY search on, and cross-referenced against words that are simply not worth competing on - this is a heavy-duty data mining activity. Have you got the time and/or resources to do this?

With all the advances in natural search methods, social marketing, PR marketing and the focus on conversation/engagement/allowing UGC to do the marketing for you, I'm not and haven't been convinced for some time that PPC is a viable option with all the leg work needed.

Human
my adwords budget is running at under £4 per month - for over 5500 impressions and around 70 clicks
each click that turns into a booking pays for the adwords campaign for 11 years
or to look at it another way, the mortgage for two months

so I'm not letting any "expert" anywhere near it thank you very much.

TalkinPeace2 - not sure I was suggesting you need an expert...?

As you've demonstrated in your description of your process of how you refined your Adwords - a year tinkering with it, spending two to three hours a week on it - it is a commitment that most people can't meet. It's great that you're self-taught and (sounds like) you've taken to it like a duck to water. It's even better you've got it working well for you. But that doesn't mean that I'm incorrect when I say that for the most part, conversion rates from PPC don't justify the time and resources spent on it. Particularly for small businesses who have precious little of either.

Content is king, conversational PR is free, social marketing is becoming the norm, user generated content and engagement is the way forward. Believe me - I would be deeply suspicious of someone claiming to be an expert in a medium that is still so young. But I've gained enough experience to realise there is no one size fits all solution, that digital marketing in is a constant state of flux and evolution - what's good for the goose isn't necessarily good for the gander. Every business has unique needs and Adwords don't fulfill all of those, for a variety of reasons.

One of my clients is a specialist gym, who also got the Adwords £50 voucher. They wanted to jump in feet first, thinking Adwords/PPC was the answer to their problems in terms of raising brand awareness. Unfortunately they were also short on time, resources and funds - funds that needed to be spent on other things like a robust CRM database. The plan I proposed to them was about engagement - reaching out to clients and prospects on their level, using the channels they wanted to be reached on, talking to them in a human way and offering up quality content that wasn't just about the hard, direct sell. The channels we used were Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and email. Within two months, they had people talking about them online - which is the biggest way to increase search/brand awareness. They have a dedicated following online, and this has transferred offline to an uptake of membership of around 60%.

They spent nothing, and got a massive return on their investment of time spent. But - equally - I wouldn't suggest this kind of plan to everyone either. DM is very much a human thing, and PPC is but a tiny aspect of it. Like I say, it's fantastic you've got it working for you and I definitely do not consider myself an expert - I am learning constantly. But for other businesses, I'm simply suggesting - instead of feeling like you need to spend money, spend a bit of time reading Mashable or something similar, learn about engagement and what it could do for your brand.

Human,
you are right (and I am lurgied so did not digest your comment fully)
BUT
I've met so many marketing people who think they an market all products and services in the same way that its put me right off!