Adwords
Adwords and my first experience.
For the past week I have been monitoring an Adwords Campaign, in which my team and I established for a pub in Richmond, BC. Honestly I found setting up an Adwords campaign to be quite confusing and not very self-explanatory. Of course I did my research, watched Google Help Videos and read blogs about obtaining free start-up coupons. Even so I came across a few ‘hiccups’ on the way, which is to be expected because who can get it right the first time?
I found it interesting that I couldn’t set up an upfront payment system where I could load $100 for instance onto the Adwords Campaign, and watch my ‘pay-per-click’ deduct from the account. Unfortunately this option is not available in most developed countries and I’m not sure why (see link). I can understand the advantage for Adwords by not having an upfront option; as there is a greater possibility that companies will spend more than they budgeted. However this option would have made my team and I’s life a lot easier.
Secondly a daily budget can help monitor the user’s spending, but Adwords can vary the daily budget as long as the end monthly bill is less than or equal to the daily amount times 30.4 (average days per month). This is a problem that my team and I occurred as we only want to test a two-week campaign; therefore our daily budget for the two weeks could exceed our final budget. Although there are ‘rules’ that can be set to control campaigns to ‘pause’ after reaching a certain amount, I still didn’t feel comfortable that it would work (so far so good). Although these are only minor things I came across, Adwords is currently testing a video-call support feature with a number of advertisers in Canada and the US. Personally I think this will be an excellent feature for people (like me) who are new to setting up an Adword Campaign and a little unsure.
After using Adwords I feel that their target market is medium-large corporations, as they are more likely to have the time, money and resources to implement Adword Campaign’s. Although Adwords is missing out on the potential of a large segment of small businesses who might not have the expertise in online marketing. Therefore Adwords could benefit from a simpler user-friendly version for the less tech-savvy.
