Small Business Advertising – Using Adwords Express

Please Mr Google allow us some flexibility with adwords express keywords

I hadn’t  known about using Adwords Express before reading an article by Brian Carter. It’ supposably it is a quick and easy way for business owners to run their adwords campaigns without requiring a consultant. Brian states ‘If you’re not familiar with AdWords Express, it’s an easy way for small businesses using Google Places to run AdWords. You don’t have to choose keywords- but you can’t modify them. So here is the catch, adwords express picks the keywords to attract traffic to your site, you have very little control and therefore google can get it so wrong. So is using adwords express going to help with advertising my small business?

Small business advertising – Using Adwords Express

So what if adwords express gets it wrong, here’s Brian’s example:

Sam Alexander (name changed to protect the innocent) runs a limo service in Orlando. He started running AdWords express. He soon ran out of money. I volunteered to take a look at his account. Over the last three months, he spent just over $9,000 on AdWords. About $5,500 of that went to the Places (AdWords Express) campaign. Seductively, the cost per click in that campaign was lower. You know why? Because many of the keywords were showing to the wrong people….

 

……147 of the 686 keywords included the word “taxi”. Sam runs a luxury service that’s up to twice as expensive as taxis. What’s worse, the keywords also included “airport shuttle” – there are often free hotel shuttles. People who want free are not going to buy a premium service.

Have you ever hired a car service to or from the airport? If not, and if you’re a taxi person, you are not my client’s customer. I told this story to another guy who’s in bail bonds. He’s not in limos, but he could see that people looking for taxis are not this guy’s customer. He is smarter than AdWords Express.

This is a very specific market, and everybody is not the customer. One of the best things about AdWords is your ability to target the right prospect. But AdWords Express doesn’t allow that.

How much of that $5,500 AdWords Express spend was relevant to Sam’s business? Only the $1,184 for car and limo keywords. That means that AdWords Express spent 79% of the money on the wrong keywords. read full post here

 

You can call me a control freak if you like, but I do like to be somewhat in control of how my advertising dollar is spent.  If I have no control over what keywords used, it seems to me that using adwords express would be a total waste of money. So please Mr Google, give us some flexibility, allow us to delete worthless keywords!

What do you think? have you used adwords express? was it successful? I would love to here your view.

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