Be Careful With Adwords
Affiliate marketing tip for the day : be very careful with what you do with your Adwords account(s). I don’t know why Adwords built their system in some ways, I guess they want to keep the most solid advertisers up. Here’s some things you should be careful about doing, because if you’re not, the following may happen (all of which have happened to me) :
- They will completely turn off your account and put it “under review”. This could take a couple days for them to get on, and until then all your ads are down.
- They will just slice and dice your campaign down to nothing. One day, volume. Next day, nothing.
- They’ll raise your minimum bids to $10.00, once again killing your campaign down to nothing.
We don’t want any of these things happening to us, so here’s a checklist of things to be careful doing when editing your Adwords accounts :
- Pausing a campaign. I don’t like pausing campaigns with the plan to resume them. Sometimes we have to do it and it’s fine, but I’ve had times where I paused a campaign and when I Resumed it, volume was waaay down. Instead of pausing the campaign, I just set the budget really low which will turn it off. I haven’t noticed any volume changes when doing that.
- Dropping bids too fast. This may be the #1 killer for me, and the thing I’ve learned most from. I’ll have my bids at $1.00 and drop them to $0.50, only to see my impressions go from 1,000,000/day to 5,000/day and no clicks. Be careful when cutting your bids.
- Too much optimization. This one sounds completely retarded, but it’s happened to me many times. I’ll edit a bunch of keyword bids, make new ads, change budgets, and then notice that none of my ads are running. Call up Adwords for them to tell me “Your account is currently under review.” This one’s kind of hard to avoid, but it’s what sometimes triggers your ads going down.
- Budget changes. I’ve had my budget at $1,000/day for testing, and then once everything was good I just wanted unlimited so I upped it to $50,000/day. This tipped off Adwords and once again, my account was put under review.
Alright, just some of the things I watch out for in Adwords.
Well that sucks, if you go from 1k a day to 50k that means they make 50k a day from you right?, why would they put your account under review?
If you didn’t want to pause a campaign you could also set the ad scheduling to only run for a short period of time as well.
Sounds like we need a new company to go through than Google. Thing is, who has the funds to do it. That is the dumbest thing I ever heard. Basically Google is silently putting caps on people? You start doing good, then cut you off.
sounds like googles worried about outside changes that are made to their own system, like the volume, and its effects? just want to make sure nothing really shady going on, but they should expect this type of stuff
Thank you once again Paul. Thank you for letting us know. It seems that they are very cautious, so I’ll be careful.
Solid tips man. I’ve experienced upping my bids dramatically and had to call to find out why they weren’t running. Although I got a very generic we will look into and they should be running soon, I pretty much believe what you said…happened. All I did was try to get the process of being up and running again done quicker.
Your points on Pausing Campaigns & Dropping Bids too fast is very true. At least I had the same experience.
Good post.
Thanks for the tips Paul, keep them going.
Be careful when making bids low to in effect pause a campaign as if they aren’t very low it will still show your ad occasionally and kill your CTR since your ad will be in an unfavorable position. I presonally like to set a short time span or low budget for the ad to run each day instead of pausing it. I still spend a few bucks each day on it but it keeps my CTR very high at all times and the ad never stops running for even 1 day.
Yeah Adwords is a sensitive mofo. Changing things carefully and gradually is one of the things I’ve learned the hard way there. One thing you can do though if they scrutinize or mess with your campaign is to re-sbumit it under a totally (previously unused) new domain. Pain in the butt, but it seems to work most of the time. ;)
Great post Paul… Good advice especially the pause campaign vs. lower budget.
Nice post… I think adwords is way too competitive… so much that those in competition will sometimes play dirty… this will cost advertisers lots of money for little to no results… :(
Great round up! I guess the new display url vs destination url policy can be added here. (They have to match without exception). I think it’s safe to say this was implemented with affiliates in mind…
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/02/update-to-display-url-policy.html
I would be furious if they raise my minimum bid to $10/click. Especially if I had it down near 0.50 – 0.75 /click before. I would simply cancel my credit card with the claim theyare charging more than I agreed to pay and dispute it.
Then again, since Adwords only gets $200 – $300/day or so from me I probably mean nothing and they wouldn’t give a shit if I left them :P
I’m at a loss to explain Google’s behavior. I think wild swings for anything tends to get their attention. I wish they would explain why they do things sometimes. It can be very perplexing.
– Dave
Great advice Paul., i now understand what I have had the same kinds of problems…
Nice advice. :) Thanks paul
What’s the best way to get things rolling again if you screwed up and did any of those things? Hypothetically of course :-(
Great post! What’s the minimum budget for testing and adwords campaign? Is about $100.00 good enough?
i usually use my adwords with fix amount.Yeah sometime it may vary but majority times its same for the whole month.I guess this shows i m stuck somewhere :P
I really liked this post, keeping under the radar with Adwords and not being flagged.
I have over a dozen paused campaigns in an account. After speaking to a G rep recently as to why a quality, targeted campaign couldn’t get impressions, I got told indirectly that my account QS sucked. I guess you’ve got to delete those campaigns (which sucks if you want to learn from past mistakes and archive them).
sounds just plain SF to me..a 50k adwords campaign…gosh..feels so warm all together now…suddenly
Hey Paul,
Interesting tip about pausing the campaign. I haven’t really checked that out before so it’ll be something I’ll keep in mind for the future.
Mind if I add these to my list at http://www.marketing-tools-review.com/blog/2008/03/the-mother-of-all-google-adwords-tips/ ?
This is some good info and I’m starting my Adword campaign as we speak, hopfully it works out fine.
Jay