Have you considered using Google’s new service Adwords Express? This new product is advertised as an automatic and easy way for small businesses to get more customers. But what it mostly is turning out to be is an automatic waste of your hard-earned money.
Google came up with Adwords Express for busy business people who do not have the time to come up with an ad, select keywords, pick a budget and so on. Google creates everything for you, but in reality, the service is very limited for many businesses.
For example, there is a good chance that Google does not understand your niche business. If you are an massage service, Google does not know anything about that, so what can happen is that Google will suggest a lot of keywords that will drive traffic to your site that you do not want. If the ad is not clear, you are going to waste money with clicks from people not interested in your product.
Here are three other reasons why Adwords Express is a waste of money:
- You cannot fine tune your keywords. Google selects your keywords automatically, based upon the category you chose. If you are using this product, NEVER accept the keywords they suggest. They do not know your industry – you do! Choose your keywords very carefully because most of their keyword suggestions will not work.
- You cannot create a negative keyword list. Negative keywords are vital because they ensure that your ads will only show up for people who want what you sell. So, if you sell expensive cars, you do not want to capture traffic from people searching with the term ‘cheap cars.’ If your ad does not have negative keywords, you will get a lot of traffic that does not make you any money.
- Broad match only is used. This caused ads to automatically run on ‘relevant variations’ of your keywords. This might work for selling pizza, but for many industries, you will get unwanted clicks. So, if your search term is ‘couples therapy,’ the ad could run on many variations of ‘therapy’ and ‘couples.’ So you could get all sorts of clicks for unrelated items.
Are you using Adwords Express currently? Then we think that you should pause your campaign and reconsider your SEO options right away.
Google often comes up with great ideas and new tools (they recently did a makeover of Google Maps), but Adwords Express is stillborn.