I had my first experience with a Google Adwords Strategist recently. As a Google Engage partner, Google issues me Adwords credits to pass out to my clients. The credits are only good for first time Adwords users.

I had just started to set up an Adwords campaign for one of my clients and issued them a $100 credit, when they received a call directly from Google. Google now offers free setup support for first time users, and this Google employee called my client to offer their services. My client is busy however, and after failing to contact them via phone, the Google employee emailed them a lengthy list of ways they could improve the campaign I was in the middle of setting up for them.

My client put the “Adwords Strategist” in contact with me, so we could work together to optimize their campaign. Here are the good and the bad ideas I got from our collaboration:

Good

1. Use all of the tools Google makes available to you to maximize click through ratio (CTR). This includes ad extensions (phone, location & sitelinks). It takes more time to setup, but for competitive keywords it should help your CTR. I think the major advantage to using all of these extensions is that it makes your ad larger than competitors who aren’t using them.
2. Negative keywords. This bit of advice was given as part of what I consider a bad strategy for this particular campaign, but I’ll give credit where credit is due.

Bad

1. Increase the budget. (My approach is to create a tight, efficient campaign and THEN increasing the budget, when the ROI is proven).
2. Forget about the niche, long tail keywords and only go after the highly competitive (aka expensive) keywords. ( OK, I can see now why I would need to increase the budget!)
3. Use broad match modifier type keywords to get more impressions and clicks, and add negative keywords to control CTR.

At that point in the campaign I was experimenting with exact match and phrase match keywords, and many of the phrase match keywords were giving me way too low a CTR, even with negative keywords. So how was I to control the CTR, and therefore the quality score, with broad match modifier keywords, which are less targeted, if I was already having trouble with phrase match? I didn’t get an answer to that question, just the repeated advice that I increase the budget and aggressively go after those competitive, broad match modified keywords and negative keywords.

I think the problem is that Adwords Strategists are low level customer services employees, well trained by Google in the mechanics and general strategies of running an Adwords campaign, but without a lot of experience in running campaigns for a variety of businesses. In addition to that, their strategies are not only aimed at making you a successful Adwords advertiser, but also maximizing earnings for Google.

For those of you who would like to take advantage of Google’s free Adwords setup support, and maintain the campaign yourself, keep in mind that Google’s advice will generally tend to:
1. Cost you more money and
2. Push you towards the higher traffic, higher cost keywords.

That has been my experience anyway.

Google Adwords Express is the stripped-down version of Google Adwords, the pay-per-click search engine advertising program that is Google’s bread and butter. Adwords Express launched last summer and has had mix reviews from advertisers.

The idea of Adwords Express is to give the non-techie business owner a way to spend money on local advertising with Google Adwords. Everything about the campaigns are automated, and the set-up is extremely fast, performed through your Google Places account dashboard. The problem? As with any activity, businesses not willing to put the time (do it yourself) or money (hiring a professional) into it will generally get little out of it. The standard Google Adwords certainly has a steep learning curve that gets steeper as time goes on, but without that learning period a small business advertiser will not understand online advertising enough to get much out of it.

The main benefit of Adwords Express touted by advertisers is that of increasing “local visibility.” So if you are not worried about getting clicks and converting them to sales, but rather just exposing your brand to the local searching public, maybe Adwords Express is a no-brainer. However, if you are looking to expand your audience beyond a 15 mile radius of your physical location, you can’t do that with Adwords Express.

Another major limitation, in my opinion, is the fact that you can only create a single ad per business category that you have listed in Google Places. So if what you want to advertise is not represented by a category in Google Places, you’re out of luck.

Does the “Express” mean that Adwords Express is less expensive than Adwords? In the competitive niche I did my research for, the answer was “No.” The cost per click (CPC) was within the same general range, but on the high end.

Based on my research, I don’t believe Adwords Express gives the small business owner the tools necessary to run and efficient campaign. This, coupled with the fact that the CPC costs are no lower than a standard Adwords campaign, makes it difficult for me to see how it would be possible to get a positive ROI when using this service.

This is an intesting glitch in Adwords I just experienced when testing an ad I have running. The search for “Bay Area Web Design” results in a mix of swimming pool ads, then appropriate ads for web design. I wonder how often this glitch occurs, and how many bad clicks are charged because of it?

Tracking Adwords conversions for Paypal transactions is fairly simple if you already have your Paypal merchant account, your Google Adwords account, and associated Google Analytics account. If not, sign up!

Google is going to track your Adwords sales conversions by checking to see if the user visits your “conversion page” after they click on your Adwords ad. The conversion page is just a “thank you” page. You can set up your Paypal “Buy Now” buttons or Paypal shopping cart to redirect the user to the page you have created for this purpose, as follows:

1. Create a “thank you” page on your Website.
2. Log into your account at http://www.Paypal.com
3. Click on the “Merchant Services” tab
4. Click on the “Web Payments Standard” link
5. Click on either the “Buy Now” button link (sell single items) or the “Add to Cart” button link (sell multiple items).
6. Click on Get Started
7. Create your button
8. At the bottom of the page click “Add More Options”
9. Go down to “Customize Your Buyer’s Experience (optional)”
10. Enter the url of the “thank you” page on your website. Make sure to set “Auto Return” to “On”.

Now log into your Google Adwords account:

1. Navigate to your Adwords campaign.
2. Click “Converstion Tracking” in the top navigation.
3. Click on the “Start Conversion Tracking” button at the bottom of the page. If you are already using conversion tracking, click on “Get conversion page code” in the left column.
4. For “Conversion Type” check “Purchase/Sale” then click “Continue” at bottom of page.
5. Select the color for the Google conversion blurb that will appear at the bottom of your page and click “Continue”.
6. Find your tracking code at the bottom of the page, and cut and paste into your “thank you” page.
7. If haven’t already, set up your site in Google Analytics and allow Adwords to share the conversion data.

Now, to test if the conversion works, just click on your ad in Google, then visit your “thank you” page (no actual transaction needed). You should see the conversion recorded in Analytics the next time it updates.