Category: News & Trends

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Inflating Your Daily Budget to Force Clicks on AdWords Can Get You In Trouble

You may say this never happens, but as I review all AdWords accounts that are running when a new prospect comes to me looking for a new account manager, this happens fairly frequently. Personally, I do not recommend this action.

What I am speaking of is when an AdWords account is in trouble and an account manager cannot get clicks for the client. The account manager sometimes gets desperate and tries to force clicks. Here is the common scenario. The actual client wants to spend $1,000 in clicks a month. They typically will be in a business that has a high click cost auction. The acting account manager has decided not to set the cost per click in the account to a level that Google will consider the account in the AdWords auction and so as a result AdWords serves the ads infrequently. The client may be then spending only $200 or so of a $1,000 click budget.

The account manager panics as the client is pressing for click performance and so the account manager sets the 30 day budget to $7,800 or $260 per day instead of $33.33 per day. The account manager is banking on the fact that the client’ cost per click is really too low to be in the auction and that AdWords won’t deliver the $7,800 in clicks in a 30 day period.

This is an actual scenario that I have seen just last week and not infrequently. I consider it is a very dangerous one. Google could, if something changed in the auction, actually deliver the $7,800 for the month in clicks and legitimately bill the client’s credit card for this activity. The client would have absolutely no recourse in regards to getting a refund.

Scary, isn’t that scenario? But, I have seen it twice in the last three weeks and many times over the last eight years I have been managing AdWords accounts. I do not believe in putting any of my clients in this type of possible jeopardy.

A better scenario is to bid to be in the auction or drop some of the ad groups and just run ad groups that have the possibility of performing within the client’s “true” budget. In each case that I have seen this scary set up used, the actual client had no idea of what the acting account manager was doing with their account and that they had taken this tactic. I personally will never manage an account in this fashion.

How can you see if your AdWords account manager is playing this dangerous game with your money and credit card? Go into your account and review on the campaign summary page your daily budget. It will be just below the campaign names. If the number there times 30 does not match the dollar figure you told your account manager you have authorized them to spend on your behalf with AdWords, you need to make a quick phone call to them to challenge their tactics. Remember, if Google could deliver the clicks to this inflated budget – and there may be a possibility they could – you would be billed and you would have to pay.

If you are looking for a honest and savvy Google AdWords account manager, I invite you to check out our AdWords services. My firm, McCord Web Services, is a Google AdWords Certified Partner and I am personally also a Google AdWords Certified Individual.

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Google AdWords Dynamic Keyword Insertion Tips

Don’t set up ad groups that target location names making it difficult to manage your ad groups. Consider using Google AdWords dynamic keyword insertion to do the work for you and keep all your location names in just one ad group.

The key to using Google AdWords dynamic keyword insertion is to carefully structure your account so that your keywords make sense with your ad text. For me if I am targeting 10 to 50 city locations say for a plumber and my keywords would be things like Waldorf plumber, Clinton plumber, Ft Washington plumber, etc. I would make sure that my ad group only contains variations as I have noted. Then in my ad text I would craft an ad that would look like this:

{KeyWord: Local Plumber}
Call for fast plumbing services for clogged
drains, sinks, toilets and bathtubs

Let’s dissect the ad text above a bit. Note that Keyword is spelled KeyWord in the curly brackets. This tells Google to make the keyword they are inserting with each letter of the beginning of each word as a capital. If I had entered keyword instead of KeyWord then the letters would all have been lower case. Note I also added default text after the : in the ad title. This text will be used if my keywords that would have been inserted makes the title go over the character count.

The great thing about dynamic keyword insertion is that Google takes the keyword phrase in your ad group and puts it in the spot where you have the curly brackets when the keyword matches a search query. This is very powerful for creating user centric ads which typically will lead to increased converions. Additionally as the keyword in the title now matches the user’s search query, Google will bold the  text drawing the readers eye to your ad.

All ad groups can’t use dynamic keyword insertion, but in many cases with properly crafted ad groups you can really move your AdWords program to the next level in regards to performance.

If you don’t have savvy AdWords management now, I invite you to visit our AdWords services page. McCord Web Services is a Google AdWords Certified Partner.

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The New PRWeb Experience

I just wrote a press release for a customer and sent it out via our preferred resource, PRWeb, last week. PRWeb has a new easier to use web template interface that makes adding your press release easier than before.

I found the new template to be excellent in regards to assisting me with character count in the title and how to make my video compatible with the most users possible. They still don’t have a good link creation program and you still need to code your link in their special proprietary format for PRWeb, but otherwise PRWeb has made some nice interface changes.

As a tip, when you do a press release for PRWeb this is how you do links.

This is sample content and more sample content. Now I am going to http://www.mccordweb.com/ [add a link in the sample content to my website]. Note how I had to add the complete URL, then more sample content.

In the above sample the item that I have underlined in the text between [ and ] will be the actual hyperlink in the press release. So quirky, and needs improvement, but just the way PRWeb does things.

I find that for $360 instead of $200 for dissemination, you really get more exposure for your press release investment. The release is sent to TV stations, Reuters, API, the New York Times, Businessweek, and many other premium outlets. The $200 SEO release does give good exposure but does not allow for your release to go to these top notch new outlets.

If you haven’t thought about doing a press release, you may want to consider scheduling one quarterly or at least twice a year. Not only is the exposure when you use PRWeb excellent, but the links that are generated to your website are one way inbound, quality, and have long staying power in search indexes. Our press release writing serviceis $175 per release plus additional fees to post and send out via PRWeb.

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The Webmaster Lockin Game and How to Defeat It

You may not know it, but in my industry it is a common practice to lock in a customer to create a long term cash flow. Some webmasters will even set up accounts in their own names for services for which you are billed just to make it difficult or nearly impossible for you to leave them and thus secure payment from you in perpetuity.

I do not believe in this particular business model and have helped a number of clients break these chains, but there are some things that you can do as an educated consumer to keep from getting in this position in the first place.

  1. Make sure that all accounts set up for you are in your name, tell your webmaster that all accounts must use your email, and your preferred password. By this I mean your web hosting, your email, your domain name, your Twitter account, your AdWords account, and even your Facebook Business Page.
  2. Once these accounts have been set up for you, make sure they are done properly and login once so you can verify that you have ownership. Review the settings in your account to verify that you are not just invited to login to the account, but you are the registered account owner.
  3. Only allow your credit card, and not that of your webmaster, to be used to pay for these accounts if there are charges. A red flag to you would be where the account is supposedly in your name, but that your credit card is not tied to the account for payment. In actuality you may just be invited to see the account but may not own it.
  4. If your web designer or webmaster refuses to do number 1, 2, and 3, I would recommend that you find another resource for your services.

Remember when your accounts are in someone else’s name, you own the rights to nothing. If your Facebook Business Page is set up as a page under the account of your webmaster and you decide to terminate your webmaster, your account, you thought you owned, is lost. It is not transferable. If your hosting account is set up as a child under the parent account of your webmaster and you have a problem, the hosting agent will not speak to you as you are not the account owner.

It is unfortunate that many clients actually do not know they do not own their own accounts until there is a problem and they want to fire their webmaster. Don’t let this happen to  you! It can be costly both in time and money to remediate if even possible.