Google Adwords

[DenisOxon]

Good Afternoon,

A friend of mine was paying Google each month for Adwords and on discussion we felt he was getting nothing for his money. We did a series of searches using terms that should find his business and he was not getting listed. If we searched for his company name then he came up. These searches were tried in Google and Google maps. We checked which Adwords he was paying for and had been set up by someone else, and tried searching for those and his company did not appear in the listings.

We cancelled all the Adwords.

Next morning I did some of the searches we had done the evening before and all of a sudden my friends company was listed each time, often at top of list.

On thinking about it I suggest the following. When you have spent your daily limit for Adwords Google actually blocks you from any listing, presumably in the hope that you put up your daily spend.

Anybody like to suggest something different please

 

[Yan Gilbert]

Did you use incognito for any of these searches? Click on any of the results?

 

[Phil Rozek]

@DenisOxon, a few things to look at:

1. The AdWords Ad Preview & Diagnosis Tool. That will tell you definitively when your ads are and are not showing.

2. Average position. If your bids weren't at page-one levels, then it makes sense you wouldn't have seen your ads, even if they were running.

3. The bidding strategy. If you picked the "maximize clicks" strategy, Google uses AI to stuff your ad where it's less expensive to do so: at a low position, or only for terms few or no businesses bid on, like brand-name terms. If you picked that bidding strategy and not "manual," that could explain the spotty visibility.

 

[DenisOxon]

Thanks for your replies gents.

No we didn't use incognito. Yes we did click on link

Thank you for your suggestions Phil. As I said we have cancelled all Adwords and will see if it makes a difference to the number of customers. We will keep in mind what you say if we start another campaign

 

[Eric Rohrback]

Second to what @Phil Rozek said. Use the preview tool to see if and when your ads are showing. In addition to the average position, you also need to look at the ad schedule reports to see if your budget is getting depleted too early in the day.

I usually use accelerated delivery because that will force the ads to show as often as possible, until the budget runs out. I always set a realistic budget to make sure we can run ads all day. If not, then I'll set some specific day-parting to make sure i'm targeting the ideal times of the day where conversions could happen. If you use standard delivery, your ads will not show all the time even though you have the daily budget for it. Google is throttling ads so that the budget lasts as long as the day-parting is set up.

There's a ton of analysis and discovery that goes into budgeting and positioning. Just because you're not seeing the ad at the time you look, doesn't mean they aren't eligible to show. You have to dig into the settings and figure out how you've set up the campaign foundation.