1) No communication. This is by far the most ridiculous thing about adwords. Logged in a month ago to see that my account was not receiving impressions or clicks for a couple days. Why? No one seemed to have a clue. Couple calls to adwords with no idea. Finally get told they are under "human review" and promptly turned back on. Would this human review have lasted until I called?
How can you possibly do this to someone who relies on your service for marketing a business? Can you imagine buying radio ads or TV ads and not running the ads and not informing the owners. Then as an owner you have to call up to find out why and they say "Oh I don't know, but they'll run sometime".
Is an automated e-mail too much to ask?
2) Daily budget. What's the point? Seems mine goes over everyday. If I say my budget is $500/day, my cost better be under $500. I can understand it being one click, but I've gone over $20-$30 on a $500 budget (clicks around $1).
3) Disclosure. I think this will be a problem Google will run into with the government in time. Fact is, we have no idea what we are paying for. I don't know my competitors bid price, so I don't know if Google is gouging me. Am I being charged $1 for my click although the guy under me may be bidding $.05.
This also can go into the content match and search. Google can't tell me where any of my clicks are coming from. How am I to know that I'm not getting 90% of my clicks from one of their lower tier partners (without reading my logs)? How am I to know what content partners are sending me clicks? How do I know if my content matching is being bashed by a click bot on some 14 year olds blog.
I'm not a law afficianado but I would imagine you'd run into some auditing problems eventually. You have to show your customers what they are paying for.
Guess it might just be frusteration with adwords, but I've never seen a business model so bad at making customers happy. It seems like they feel they are doing us a favor by allowing us to advertise on their site. I guess with no competition in the arena, they can do what they want.
To be honest, I'm looking forward to some stiff competition from MSN in the near future. They can't do much worse. Maybe then Google will realize that customers actually matter.
Guess it might just be frusteration with adwords, but I've never seen a business model so bad at making customers happy. It seems like they feel they are doing us a favor by allowing us to advertise on their site. I guess with no competition in the arena, they can do what they want.
patience my friend, when it works, it ROCKS :)
To be honest, I'm looking forward to some stiff competition from MSN in the near future. They can't do much worse. Maybe then Google will realize that customers actually matter.
the Grass is always greener on the other side, still gotta cut the damn thing :(
Shak
This also can go into the content match and search. Google can't tell me where any of my clicks are coming from. How am I to know that I'm not getting 90% of my clicks from one of their lower tier partners (without reading my logs)? How am I to know what content partners are sending me clicks? How do I know if my content matching is being bashed by a click bot on some 14 year olds blog.
From this part of the rant, it looks like you are not happy with the ROI you are getting. If yes, why are you still paying $1.00 per click? Especially when Google is going over the daily budget limit?
Do you have some sort of keyword conversion tracking in place? Eventhough Google is not telling you much about the source of traffic, it does tell you whether its traffic is converting or not. That information is enough for most advertisers to decide how much they want to spend on AdWords.
It's your money - don't pay Google $1.00 per click/$500 per day if their traffic is not converting.
2) Daily budget. What's the point? Seems mine goes over everyday.
As Shak said, patience. Since you posted this comment, you must have not been billed yet so you've only been in for 2-4 weeks. At the end of each billing cycle, Google automatically reduces your costs to your maximum daily budget. All that extra traffic you get over your daily budget is free. :)
How am I to know that I'm not getting 90% of my clicks from one of their lower tier partners
Opting out of content and/or search syndication is an option. It's not the default setting but chances are if that type of traffic is passing through the filters you will all but eliminate it by having your ads show on Google only.
