;)
It is good.
Do or Die!
It looks like I am doing now!
In light of everything, I really do love the new system. Thank goodness I get to spend more time with Google now. Stoplights, bathroom breaks and sleeping used to take up the average Joe's time in his lifetime: you can add AdWords management to that peculiar list now.
Geesh, do people really have that much time on their hands? If you were selling one product and only had 200 keywords to deal with, of course, no biggie, you get ripped off slightly and you don't even have to spend hours and hours working with it. GRRR.
For me the new system, with the Budget Optimizer on, is no more trouble and about half the CPC of before. I do not have to spend lots of time monitoring.
Rgds
Damon
My view about BO(!) is that it can adjust to variables you don't even know about, and at times when you cannot be online.
I'm not saying that it (yet) does these things, but for my simple and small campaigns it does a better job than I could, IMHO.
Of course, if you are (feeling) paranoid, it's not for you, but if G was caught deliberately screwing its customers this way it would be such bad faith that politicos all over the world would be leaping on the G-is-evil bandwagon so quick it would not even make it to a petrol station before the oil runs out...
Rgds
Damon
My CPC hasn't actually gone down except for certain keywords. The generally useful keywords, you know... the ones that actually create traffic are more often than not higher in CPC.
I can also attest that in ratio to amount spent I am not making the same amount of profit. I don't need a budget optimizer I need my *@#$*&@ keywords activated without a $1 - $30 per click.
Well, in the UK, the company boss is not allowed to manage their own petty cash for very good reasons.
For my "petty cash" AW budget (well, with some expensive lumps in when I'm experimenting!) I *know* that half will be wasted, and I'm as happy to let BO waste it as me...
Which is NOT the same as taking your eye off the ball and letting it go wild, I agree. I'm finding the CPM campaign I'm trying very inefficient, at least without proper stats to show me otherwise.
Rgds
Damon
Ember, you couldn't be more mistaken IMO. The advertisers who are generally having the most success with AdWords are the ones who've found good SEM firms to manage it for them. When I talk to advertisers who've been managing their AdWords campaigns inhouse, what I typically hear is "We're managing it by hand." That's the surest way to fail, resulting in either lack of responsiveness to changing market dynamics, or missing out on maximum volume of revenues. Someone who tries to manage bids manually either gets nothing else done or manages infrequently at best.
There are reasons investment professionals exist - the majority of us achieve higher returns having someone else manage our money. The same thing is true for AdWords only more so. Talk about a market where guidance is needed!
-Google's Traffic Estimator is broken,
-brand advertisers are trying to push 3-5X more offline ad $$ into search than can be done efficiently,
-industry average CTR's and CR's are woefully inadequate
-keyword lists running into thousands or hundreds of thousands, yet no historical S&P-type data exists to evaluate them
-internal employees who *do* know AdWords are in short supply and jumping ship for 40-80% pay raises
-ROI tracking is messed up far more often than it's done right
There's a reason the majority of top 5000 ppc advertisers use an outside firm to manage AdWords for them - better, more consistent returns. Which is not to say your own case may not be different (if you're on WebmasterWorld already that makes u a relative ppc expert), but IMO you couldn't be more off the mark.
-Shorebreak
Good point though! ;)
if G was caught deliberately screwing its customers this way
Indeed, "if".
My tin-foil hat is put away in a drawer, honest.
Rgds
Damon
The goal is to spend your budget.
But, the way you win this game is to maximize your rate of return, part of which involves split testing ads to get the best CTR, so you can then lower your cost per click with the same position, at less cost.
After that point you can then either find the "sweet spot" for that keyword in terms of ROI, or you can move up, increase your budget and be in the top 3 spots 100% of the time, 24/7, and dominate that keyword/category.
But the way the budget optimizer works actually defeats your long term purpose in PPC
BO tries to spend your budget efficiently.
I really use my AW campaigns for exposure rather than sales, and it does well for me, lowering my CPC by a factor of 2 and keeping my cost-per-conversion ("conversion" being evidence of stickyness rather than a sale) really low.
But BO clearly cannot do that job for all goals, agreed.
Then you would need to use something like the API and a goal-seeking algorithm (heck, even the one in Excel might do the trick) that optimises the right quantity for you.
The point is, with huge numbers of chaotic (or noisy, low-information) variables, humans are demonstrably much worse than machines, and so manually optimising your campaigns, except in very limited areas, is likely to be a waste of time.
That's not G's fault, that's the nature of data-rich, feature-poor, dynamic systems and the human brain.
Rgds
Damon
