[PCWorld]

Post your comments for How to get started with Google AdWords here

[alwayspraveen]

Head Line Can Only be 25characters long i reckon

[cobnut]

Hi Christopher, it's a bold person that tries to summarise building an Adwords Account in just two short pages and I have to say I question whether it does more harm than good. As one of the Top Contributors to the English Adwords Support Community (which deserves a mention - https://www.en.adwor...ty/ct-p/AdWords) most of my work on that board is spent helping people who have difficulties with their Adwords Accounts. In many cases these problems are the result of poor or incomplete advice.

I'm not going to pull your article apart completely, but there are some key elements that have been missed and some poor advice that I feel must be corrected.

1. As Praveen has already said, the headline is 25, not 35 characters.
2. Don't use multiple Ad Groups to test Ad variations. Ad Groups should be focused to a theme and Ad variations should be tested *within* that theme. In other words, you should test multiple Ads within the *same* Ad Group.
3. Thinking of Adwords in terms of a raw spend or "cost" is a bad approach. Adwords should be considered from an *investment* point of view. Any advertising that is not pure brand awareness should return positive results so setting of budgets and CPCs is about managing the *return* on results, not plucking random figures from the air.
4. You don't mention Keyword match types and your screenshots show only simple Broad matches. Over-use of Broad matches is one of the most common reasons for poor Account performance.
5. Your "Best Practices" link points to the Certification Learning centre rather than a more useful link to the Help pages.
6. You've never seen a Quality Score higher than 6/10? That says a lot. I would consider any Account running Keywords at *less* than 7/10 to be in need of optimisation and have several where *all* the Keywords are 10/10. Perhaps it's all those Broad matches you use.

I could go on. For some time.

I don't want to sound as though I'm just pulling you apart personally. I think the real problem here is that the subject is just too big to try and cover in so short an article. If this were about pretty much any other IT related issue it wouldn't be such a concern but people spend *money* on Adwords - a lot sometimes - and they do so as an important business decision. It is very frustrating to find someone who is shouting and screaming that Google has "ripped them off" when the reality is they've just had some bad advice.

Jon

[ScottyDunroe]

I agree entirely with the comment made above and like Jon I would just like to provide more assistance / information rather than try to pull your article apart.

Jon has touched upon it in his third point but your readers need to be aware about the budget side of AdWords when it comes to different industries. If a business has $1,000 to spend a year and only $2.75 then they are never going to see a return on their campaigns for an industry like consultancy (as per your example) regardless of how well their account has been setup. A quick search using the Keyword Tool showed estimates of consultant related keywords starting from a minimum of around $2 and going up to $13+; with a daily budget of $2.75 you are looking at getting a single click and therefore require a conversion rate of 100% to see any sort of success which is unfortunately unrealistic.

A better way to view the budget system in the scenario would be to allocate your $1,000 for the month which gives you a daily budget of $33, this then gives you more room to generate a conversion within a day and with the profit from that sale / client you can reinvest back into AdWords so that you can keep your ads running and therefore generate more conversions.