Google Express is the next step in the natural progression by Google in order to simplify AdWords for smaller advertisers:
- CPC bids permitted you to designate that which you wanted to buy a click - Google would find out your actual cost, however you could actually tell them the most you wished to pay for each click by keyword.
- AdWords Express - Rather than saying you’ll pay X for the click or you’ll pay Y for just a conversion, just tell Google what we have to spend on a monthly basis and they’ll decide the rest. Paid search without keywords for small business owners is finally here!
- CPA bidding via conversion optimizer and bidding options like enhanced CPC were the next thing in this evolution - as an alternative to simply setting a quote at the keyword level, you are ceding more control to Google to advance bids around and check out or below your designated CPC when it looked like it made sense determined by Google’s data.
The general idea is you set up a remarkably simple campaign that features nothing but:
- A maximum monthly budget (don’t worry: Google will give you a highlighted recommendation if you’re unsure. It’s in green, therefore you know it’s the favorable one.)
- Your ad description
- Your category
- Your ad headline
- Where to send out people (send those to your site, or in addition to this: send those to Google’s site!)
Here’s how this appears to be you walk through the register:
The sign-up process is in fact somewhat un-Google-esque because despite
the fact that you'll need a places page to make use of Google Express,
it’s actually a fairly smooth process to start whether you then have a
places page or otherwise. (The standard Google login issues persist
otherwise, though - if you’re a professional or just use some mixture of
Webmaster Tools/AdWords/Google Analytics/Gmail for multiple sites with
multiple people you're friends with how maddening and confounding the
account permissions could be.)
Once you’ve created your ad and designated simply how much you want to
spend, that’s just about it. You can monitor activity on your own places
account within your places dashboard,
If you need to actually do a deep dive to determine where your money’s
going, that’s where things obtain a little clunky. You can click this
link to edit or deactivate the ad shown above and scroll right down to
the bottom of the ad and deactivate, or you can jump over into AdWords
to watch billing plus much more specific activity with your account. This will available
your AdWords account, but it’s basically “read only” and you will see
the keywords being get but can’t make any changes (form of like a shady
PPC agency that won’t help you see your actual account but provides you
with reports monthly):
Here are definitely the segmentations being devised for our Arlington-based SEM agency. We have business name, business name Arlington, business name Wellington and Harrington (a neighborhood neighborhood), business name affiliate marketing, etc.
We’ve only created one ad but Google has assured us that they'll “create
other versions using content you provide in Google Places,” though of
course it’s probably not clear what meaning.
Google AdWords Express Best review
So Is AdWords Express a Bad Idea for SMBs?
Obviously I’m much less bullish about the execution as Google is, but
believe it or otherwise this may can even make sense for some small
companies, particularly local ones. Some things to make note of about
the campaign above:
- This work isn’t created by a competent PPC campaign manager, because generally competent PPC campaign managers don’t develop $50-$750 each month PPC spends.
- This is actually comparatively poorly constructed. If a PPC campaign manager created these keyword combinations and ad groups, applied exactly the same generic ad that he / she asked that you write to every one of them, and easily ran an algorithm to regulate bids (and refused to help you make any changes or additions, and did his / her best to prevent you from getting an excessive amount actual clues about what was happening in the campaign) they might be labeled by most (and in all likelihood even Google) as shady at best.
The economics of percent-of-spend pricing, pay-for-performance PPC
pricing, and charging a great flat rate for ones expertise ensure it is
generally impossible to get a PPC expert to work towards micro-sized
accounts. Even software and services brands like WordStream that provide
affordably priced PPC management software and pay-per-click management
services targeted at small to medium-sized businesses have service
offerings that start at 50-100% of people budgets, because to receive a
competent PPC consultant to work on your own account you just can’t
charge any less.
So if you’re a compact, local company marketing that can’t afford lots
of hundred dollars per month you need to look at the following:
- Can you afford to run Google Express to be a test? If yes and you’re spending only a couple hundred per month, this might be more than worth it. If you add the campaign up also it does better than you had been doing yourself or if you install it and with no intervention in your part it performs profitably for you personally and does much better than other marketing channels, you very well could be better off letting Google manage your small spend and working on other responsibilities.
- Do you recognize enough about AdWords to “do it yourself”? If not, is it possible to invest a sum of money to possess someone start a PPC audit? If that’s something within your budget, it will be worth it to invest monthly or two (and up) of spend in enabling a professional for taking a deep dive for your account, push the button using recommendations, and hand you some specific instructions for self-maintenance with time. Alternatively when you can invest time in learning AdWords and managing the account yourself (then evaluate your agility with the free AdWords Grader tool), which will also be a possibility, but take care not to over-invest with your sweat-equity if you could be better leveraging your time and effort in other areas of one's business.
Ultimately, whether to work with Google Express or otherwise not is a
business decision: does enough time savings from Google Express, the
outcomes it generates, plus the savings on paying someone to regulate your account soon add up to a net
win on your business? On monthly spends anywhere inside the thousands I
think this may rarely (if) be the case as being the product is
currently constituted, but when you spend about 200 bucks per month it
may often be a viable option.
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