Revving the Chainsaw
Revving the Chainsaw
Last year I compared Google’s Ad Words to a chainsaw–an evil chainsaw with a taste for human flesh!
A couple weeks ago, Google offered me a “free optimization” of one of my ad campaigns. The sounds of revving were loud, but I decided I’d give it a shot. After all, I’m the first to admit that I have only experiential knowledge of Ad Words. What I’ve learned, I’ve learned by doing (and sometimes “doing poorly”).
I’ve tended to avoid most SEO advice (because I have a soul). Here, though, was a chance to see what The Beast could do, and a chance to maybe learn something new and useful.
Yesterday I put their optimizations into play (after carefully saving what I had before, of course). So far, I feel confident that I got my money’s worth. 
What I’m appreciating so far is:
- the way-expanded list of negative keywords. I had 5. They had 86. And, damnit, they were right.
- the organization of the campaigns by keywords. Not just keywords, but collections of related search approaches, that will allow greater customization of bids and text ads. Obvious in retrospect, and I had done some of this. They did it better.
Speaking of text ads, though, I’m a bit underwhelmed by their text ad choices. On the plus side, they came up with text ads (based on my Web pages) that I would never have thought of. And that’s good. Because I can use their ideas as new foundations for text ad tinkering.
On the other hand, I’ve added back my old main text ad because I think it will outperform the ones they came up with. And is already outperforming them in one case.
Still, for $0, I think I got something useful out of the exercise. The expanded negative keyword list will likely save me a lot of money monthly. But it’ll take at least a week to know how much real value I got out of the rest.
Now I’m curious: Anyone else taken advantage of Google’s free optimization offer?
-David
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