AdWords Invitation Again

While it seems many are still feeling the effects of a the financial downturn, the monster that is Google reported 6.6 billion dollars revenue recently. No-one is denying the firm's amazing grasp on today's current market share, and if anyone can topple Apple's current iphone monopoly, it could just be Google (but maybe not with the nexus one). Indeed, CEO Eric Schmidt will be touching down in Barcelona next month for the 3GSM Mobile Phone conference.


However, maybe the above article has more to tell, as investors were less than pleased with the revenue created in the last release. Cue my typical letter through the post for an invitation to Google's AdWords programme. I'm not quite sure why Google assume I'm not already using AdWords, or have not in the past, but still the letters come.

This time, the offer was for 75 Euros to spend on AdWords, with the usual annoyance of this only applying to new accounts of less than 14 days validity. So that's really 75 Euros minus the $5 Google makes you pay to set up the account then? The amount goes down if I don't "claim" my credit before 28th February - a clever trick to get users in the door asap.

As I've explained before, this "hook" is an easy way for Google to make more money, given that the majority of small businesses would leap at the chance to have a free 75 Euros spend on AdWords, perhaps not knowing the cost per click of their chosen keywords. AdWords interface is sufficiently complicated for you to plug away until you have a campaign and a couple of adgroups set up for a free 75 Euros, but the enticement is there once that 75 Euros is spent - they already have your credit card, and you have your campaign set up, so all you need to do is leave it live - temptation is great.

Depsite there being some great online resources from Google themselves to learn more about AdWords, it's not all that well publicised, and I suspect that many people will be sucked into throwing away lots of cash on campaigns which are not optimised, or which they have no idea of how to manage. It's also fairly well known that ads can appear on poor choices of the content network, and that default settings such as broad match are always left on, meaning an initial 2 or 3 day campaign can throw away money before refinement is carried out.

Do you have an AdWords account which needs attention? I offer AdWords set up and management in Barcelona as well as other Pay Per click campaigns. Contact me at Barcelona SEO for more details.