El Reg thinks Google’s business model is meltdown proof – if Google needs more revenue, they can just come up with a way to display your ads more often. While I still think Google Adwords is great marketing tool for almost every business, I agree you have to keep a close eye on your campaigns.
Some checkboxes you might consider turning off in your campaign settings:
- Automatic matching (not available in all countries)
- iPhone ads
- Search Partners
Search Partners? Why wouldn’t I want Google to show my ads on sites like Google product search, ask.com and aol? Well, because they’re showing on ebay, too, even though Google doesn’t mention this in Adwords help.
I asked Google last year and got this reply:
“Our global search network includes Google Product Search, Google Groups, and search sites such as AOL, Ask.com, ebay.com/ebay.de and shopping.com.”
An no, you can’t chose certain sites, it’s all or nothing.
In our case, “nothing” was the right choice. Ebay customers are not our target market and we actually stopped selling on Ebay years ago. Why would we want to display ads there?
Instead of throwing tons of money at Google Adwords, we restricted spending to a sensible level, redesigned our main online shop and invested some time into SEO. The result? December turnover increased by 50% in comparison to last year while costs for Adwords decreased by 57%.
No, Google did not steal our Christmas. 😉