Google Adwords Optimisation

No, really that’s dreadful! Google really are out to make themselves money, and lots of it…

Im going back a few years, Google Optimised my campaign by listing the names of my competitors within my keywords and creating ads mentioning the names of my competitors.

One by one, the ads got removed for trademark violations.

Needless to say, I didn’t take Google’s advice again

Don’t you read my blog?

I had the same problem 1-1/2 years ago. They optimized my campaign so I’d blow through my daily budget – it was optimized for Google’s sake, not mine.

Thanks for the comments guys.

I haven’t yet found anyone praising the service from google!

Eric – of course I read your blog I just forgot……

A few years back when I was working at Latitude, we had an Adwords editorial team drop by to give us help on campaigns.

They were all Oxbridge English grads who had no idea about direct marketing – especially not direct marketing on Google.

Okay, you’ve spent your entire academic life writing long-winded essays and you think you’re the best guy to tell us how to write a 70 character advert?

It didn’t go as planned….

The fundamental problem with their optimisation people is that they don’t have enough knowledge about your ROI to make the decisions they’re making. I’ve had a lot of campaigns where it took me a lot of tuning to move them into profit and even then it was a slim profit. It doesn’t take much to undo all that.

Everyone has to try this once, but I can’t see Google getting too many repeat customers for this service.

I have let Google do a couple of small optimisations before and they have got it wrong every time. They keep on offering but now I know to politely decline.

Overall I think the Google AdWords support team are fantastic – my account manager certainly goes beyond the call of duty when it comes to helping out. He is always ready to troubleshoot problems and gives good ideas to improve current campaigns.

However, I must agree that when it comes to them optimising campaigns, they definitely aren’t so hot.

It is very frustrating that Google’s “support” processes are universally so bad.

It doesn’t matter whether it is AdWords, AdSense, Gmail or plain old search, the company that smugly likes to think of itself as one that “does no evil” is absolutely terrible at support.

By way of contrast, the support people at Microsoft AdCenter are unfailingly nice and helpful.

Who’d of thought it, Microsoft get something right for once!

An organisation that promised to organise the internet into useful information is relying more and more on outsourcing unskilled human resources to do mundane work that accounts for the bulk of their communications. so much for their technology.

Martin

Further proof of the fact that if you want it done right you better do it yourself.

Personally, I sense such a conflict of interest that I don’t think I’d want G tweaking my campaigns.

Hi,

Google is doing changes to Adwords on a frequent basis. The option to set up keywords on the campaign level may be new. (I have never set up negative keywords at campaign level) However, it is inflexible for some websites because the negative keywords at the campaign level can impact all ad groups included within that campaign. For those who have different marketing purposes for each ad group, negative keywords must be set at the ad group level for sure.

There has always been a debate about whether Adwords optimization should be done by outsiders or in-house. I have got 2 years experience with Google Adwords in China, one of them was spent on doing Adwords optimization for clients and I am now doing some in-house optimization now for a new start-up company.

In China, Google’s approach to selling Adwords is through authorized resellers. However, resellers tend not to fully undertand the needs of their clients. I have seen lots of websites with al kinds of expectations from Adwords, I must say that Google has some inflexible approach to client’s Adwords structure, and very often,making advertisers feel they lose lots of money to Google.

When you switch your role from doing optimization for someone else to doing it for your own employer or company, you will easily find that the way of thinking regarding how to maximize Adwords’s benefits is indeed different.

Hope to share more with you in the future

Regards,

Wei

I wouldn’t let them anywhere near my campaign, they are totally cash centric and will probably cost you more in the long-run.

Ha, yes, we had some Google representatives in the office a while back giving us some “advice”. Actually I learnt a fair bit as Adwords isn’t my area of responsibility. It’s worth getting in touch with them for training they can be quite willing to work with us and we helped test some new optimiser features a while back. Prob helps that we are based near them in Victoria!

are you doubly sure that it was Google & not the company that goes around claiming to represent Google?

Hi Claire – I know the sort of scam you are talking about but this was definitely google as they had access to my account etc