Google AdWords: Starting and Running an Ad Campaign Without Going Broke

Google's AdWords is the company's biggest money maker, generating more than $20B in 2008 alone, up 20% from 2007. AdWords has a steep learning curve and takes considerable time and money to get started. Without initial start-up cash for your new campaign, you'll likely get tired, bored and frustrated, and quit altogether before you even launch the campaign successfully. Ensure you have an adequate budget for your campaign even before you launch it.

Be prepared to put in many hours each day for at least a month to adequately track your progress. You'll likely have to read just about every Help file Google offers, to better understand how to use AdWords effectively. In their initial Help section, there're 40 different sections, with each section linking to at least one other page that contains other linked pages with additional content like suggestions, Flash videos, and further links to other helpful sections. In short, it's a maze of so-called Help that will take more than a week to get through in just reading and navigating alone.

Anyone with half a brain, a computer connected to the Internet, and a bank account with sufficient funds can sign up and generate an ad campaign. Signing up costs $5.00, which is automatically deducted from the bank account your specify when signing up.

Beware, though: without proper care and monitoring of your funds, they'll run out before you know it. It's not unlike gambling in Vegas: you start out with a fixed amount of cash or coin, and with time, it diminishes quickly. If you have a product of service to sell, and it's something people want, and if your product or service shows up on sites or in search results, you may get some traffic from genuinely interested customers. You'll also get a lot of people who are simply curious or bored or just plain mean, who click on your ads to drain you of funds. Quickly.

How do you get started using AdWords to create your online ad campaign? When you sign up, download the AdWords Editor from the AdWords website, and use it to edit all aspects of your ads, bids, keywords and placements, plus statistics about the performance of your ads across the entire Google network and its "partner" search engines like Clusty, which is a Google rival.

The Editor is almost as fast at making changes to your ads as doing it on the main Google page for your ad campaign, although the Editor does allow you to edit offline when the Internet may be down, then you can upload your changes when it's back online.

The Editor has many excellent basic features, most of which can be learned within a day. However, some of those features, like bidding tactics and strategies, must be learned from trial and much error. The Editor is only a tool for making changes to your ads and supporting materials, and then implementing those changes.

To place your ads, you must specify bids for two separate networks: Search and Content. Search Network: when someone enters keywords in a search engine, they receive pages of results. Depending on how much you bid, your ad or multiple ads may appear in the search results. If you outbid all your competitors, your ad will appear in the top spot.

Content Network: this network is basically everything other than search results, links and sponsors in the Search Network: corporate and personal websites, documents and images; government websites, documents and images, etc.

When you place a bid to have your ad appear somewhere in the Content Network, it can be as low as a penny ($0.01) per click. Unfortunately, Google sometimes ignores you and charges you a high fee per click. Why this occurs is uncertain.

Google's software will sometimes place your ads on websites whose content in completely irrelevant to your keywords and they product or service you're offering. My ghostwriter ads were placed on sites that had information about ghosts, as in apparitions. They may as well have placed my ads offering book ghostwriting and editing services on Playboy or some other completely irrelevant site. What's more, Google also charged me for that irrelevant placement.

How do you avoid having your ads being placed on spurious sites? Google doesn't offer advice up front. Its business model really depends on earning as much money as possible, and this includes money from your doing all the wrong things when deploying an AdWords ad campaign. Google's "negative keywords" function helps to eliminate sites that are irrelevant to your campaign.

Can your ad run on both Search and Content sections? Yes, although it may cost you significantly more per click to run your ad on the Content Network.

What's the cost of running on both? I found that, for my ghostwriting and editing campaign, it cost me about $2.50 per click on the Search Network, and $6.50 per click on the Content Network, even though I bid $100.00 per click on the Search and $0.01 per click on the Content. Hmmm.

Can you run on only one section, say, Search? Yes, but Google appears to penalize you if you only run on the Search Network, as Google makes the majority of its money from ads running on the Content Network.

The Search Network is usually less expensive to run ads on, so you might think to use only that method. As I said before, Google penalizes you if you run only on its Search Network. Google penalizes you if you run your ads only on the Search Network. The Content Network provides hundreds of thousands more impressions than does the Search Network, simply because the Content Network exposes your ads to many, many more sites, a lot of them irrelevant.

How does the bidding work? You specify what amount of money you're willing to pay per click, both for the Search Network and Content Network. You can opt out of the Content Network, however. The maximum bid for my ghostwriting and editing ads was $100.00 per click.

Google absolutely depends on its complex AdWords feature to baffle customers, if only for a while. During that difficult learning period, Google rakes in billions of dollars that reflect customers' gross ignorance of the service and thus costly mistakes made during the process of learning how to use the service.

Google earns billions of dollars each year from your mistakes. Look at it this way: if it were in Google's best interest to have its customers not make mistakes initially, then Google would create a more user-friendly AdWords site that walked you through all the necessary steps, from A to Z. Does this occur? Again, no.

While I feel AdWords is a worthwhile service to use, Google goes out of its way to make it difficult for, and thus costly to, its customers, some of whom are so angered and frustrated by the whole experience that they never use it again.

Beware the lengthy and difficult start-up period when beginning an ad campaign using AdWords. And remember the adage: If it looks easy, it's hard.

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