Naive Newbie Needs Nudging

I cannot make Adwords work at all!

[partnermine]

I need help. I never thought I'd need it because Adowrds looks so simple and inviting, but I need help.

So, simple things:

I have a low initial budget. Shoestring really

I am happy to accept low page placement and releatively few impressions

As money comes I can raise my budget

Thsi is all really basic stuff. I am small beer today. I hope to be a whole brewery tomorrow. But Adowrds looks perfect for a small advertiser and a small businessman.

Day 1: I had 350+ words, almost all of which ran well. But at midnight the site "slowed delivery". A word, actually the BEST word, was disabled. It had a 1.1% CTR.

I respeeded the site. Is that a word?

Day 2: I deleted MANY adwords that now went into on hold. I ended day 2 with 92 words left form my original list. I monitored the heck out of the list all day and deleted any that went onto undesirable states. At midnight the site "Slowed delivery". I did get cross here.

Day 3 I deleted every word that never had a click. I deleted every word, in fact, except one. Now my site is a dating site. The word I left in was "Dating". Logical or what? And at midnight it slowed delivery for the third time and I must now pay money for nothing to Google to get respeeded.

Please will someone tell me what I am doing wrong? I read and contributed to another thread about adwords, but I also note that Adwords Advisor does not post in that because it is a controversial thread, and presumably he canp't because of his jobh role get involved in Google Bashing threads. So let's please keep this thread as advice for the newbie who cannot make he goshdarned thing work.

[AdWordsAdvisor]

"This seems very hard"

I predict that in a few days a light bulb will go off, and you'll say to yourself 'Oh, now I get it!'

And then, after that point it'll start going much faster. And you might even start having some fun with it.

Last piece of advice for the day: start slowly, give yourself time to learn the ropes, build upon what you learn, know that it may require work but it's worth it*, and have some fun.

Then the last step: start giving advice on this forum yourself, once your an expert. ;)

AWA

*At least if you feel that traffic from the Internet is a potentially important source of customers for your business.

[partnermine]

I have a saviour. I asked adwords support for help. And something very practical has happened. I have had a very useful email suggesting that they work with me to help me get my account starting to produce results. Obviously I didn't just scream "help!" at them, but I gavce as full a background as I could, including aiming them here to see how I was trying to learn.

This proves a couple of things to me:

Using threads (and there is another thread that bases Google) to bash is a poor use of both time and emotion

Asking for help (and I am not discounting the help I have already received from the people here at all, because that is working) is the best thing one can do.
I will report the progress as we go. I am trying very hard indeed to learn what to do to get this right. I susoect I need to change my frame of reference a little. I'm trying.

The thing that impressed me most was that the gentleman who replied proved that he had read my issues and was working with me to make things work. No standard reply there.

[AdWordsAdvisor]

...I asked adwords support for help. And something very practical has happened. I have had a very useful email suggesting that they work with me to help me get my account starting to produce results...

...The thing that impressed me most was that the gentleman who replied proved that he had read my issues and was working with me to make things work...

How nice to hear, partnermine. Thanks for posting this - you made my day!

I wish you every success with AdWords. Based on what little I know of your business so far, I'm pretty sure it'll work well for you. ;)

And, of course, your 'ready and willing to learn' approach will take you a very long way (and is also an AdWords support person's dream).

;) AWA