However, as I'm now helping out some small companies and individuals, I'm finding myself increasingly frustrated with some of AdWords shortcomings.
1) Frequent error messages / timeouts.
I think I can count on one finger the number of times I recall the main Google search to be down. In contrast, I don't have enough fingers and toes to count the number of times I've silently cursed the AdWords system... slow logins, unprocessed new campaign ad text, and so on. Maybe the AdWords team could borrow a bit of the general search computing power and reliability? ;)
2) Difficulty in managing large campaigns.
With various phrase combinations and a broad theme, I'm implementing a set of campaigns for a friend that each have >2000 keyword phrases. This requires the splitting of campaigns and also makes glancing at stats a bit more cumbersome. Overture, for instance, lets us send them an excel spreadsheet (though, in fairness to AdWords, Overture does impose an editorial delay).
Maybe there are extra tricks and such that I haven't learned yet; I'm still relatively new to the world of 'mega campaigns.' But in the meantime, I'm finding AdWords feature-rich, but poor in areas of stability and simple handiness.
I get error messages all the time... And each time I get angrier and angrier. I like the system, but with the new changes in the look, and the error messages, I sometimes wonder.
C.K.
P.S. I e-mailed them awhile ago about the error messages, and they said it was fixed. Ha
