The proposals all featured the default broad matching only - no "phrase" or [exact] matching. When I asked why they said their recommendation was to start broad and only use phrase or exact syntax if CTR were below the .5% threshold.
To me this seems to be a 'blunt instrument' type of approach and contrary to the advice given by experienced PPC practioners like Andrew Goodman & Jim Banks (webdiversity).
I think the approach suggested by Google is likely to lead to poor campaign ROI due to too many inappropriate clickthroughs and higher CPC than more targeted keywords.
What's been the experience of others who've had Adword campaign proposals prepared by Google? At this point I'm not sure what benefit I can see using them.
It is indeed contrary to the way we set up campaigns, we prefer to go for phrase and exact, with the occasional negative, whereas we tend to find those people that go the broad route end up having a long list of negative keywords and a tough time trying to track the "real" keywords and calls to action.
In some respects the advertiser sees respectable CTR on their ads, and on the surface, all looks well regarding the campaign.
One thing we always try to do at the outset of taking over the management of a campaign is to put in place some tracking, and I'd have to bleep out most of the comments on the traffic, once people can really see what people have typed in and clicked on a broad match.
That being said, if you are going to go down the self service route then adopting Google's way could well be the best route, and better than no traffic at all.
You pay your money and you take your chance.
The reason I looked to use them was because of the credit facility and also the ability to have them load campaigns using the clever Excel ad creative spreadsheet they supply.
Found the latter helpful previously for campaigns with lots of adgroups & keywords. However given power-posting and the new interface I'm not sure there's any real benefit now. Also my credit app got declined :-(
As givens we always say we don't want content networked traffic, and we never use broad match straight off the bat.
Setting up campaigns in Excel has never been that difficult, and the creatives are easy enough to do too.
Where they help a lot for us is in the setting up of accounts where the client already uses Google, it's a much slicker process and one which other PPC's should aim to sort out.
