Editor’s Note: This article is the final post as part of our Hero Conf London Guest Post Giveaway. Based on a combination of pageviews, shares and editorial review from the PPC Hero writing staff, a winner will be chosen from the finalists we post throughout the week. Today’s post comes to us from SEO, copywriting and PPC Specialist, Emma McHale (@EmmaMcHal).
I love PPC and I love using Google AdWords. That is probably not something you hear often, but I really do. I like how you can set up an AdWords campaign and have the ads appearing to people who are searching for that product or service within an hour.
However, using AdWords every day can make you notice the small things that are wrong with the system. These are 12 ways AdWords drives PPC managers crazy.
1) In AdWords, when you are creating a new campaign, you are first directed to write the name of the campaign and then asked to choose the campaign type. If you did not choose the right campaign type on the previous page, the campaign name will reset.
2) Error messages on Google AdWords are the worst messages in the world. If your internet connection is playing up or you are having issues with AdWords, a message will pop up telling you that AdWords is having problems.
3) When setting up an ad group, the estimate search traffic is above the default bid, even though you are required to input the default bid before estimating the search traffic.
4) Character limits are useful and ensure every advertiser has the same amount of space to describe the product or service they are offering. However, when you need literally one or two more characters to explain something in an ad, character limits can be really infuriating.
5) Sometimes when using the keyword planner tool, it returns a message that there was a problem retrieving keyword ideas. It can often require me to log out and log in again before it decides to work properly.
6) Since the upgrade to final URLs from destination URLs, the dimensions tab has still been showing the destination URL report with no data available due to the change.
7) Even though where I work has a wired internet connection to ensure a reliable internet, AdWords still takes ages to save changes sometimes. These can be as simple as keyword bids.
8) I use Google Chrome as my browser, however, I find that sometimes when I click on a button in AdWords it doesn’t work. I’ve sometimes had to log out and log back in to AdWords before I have been able to do the action I wanted.
9) When creating many campaigns, I prefer to set up the billing at the end so that I can ensure the campaigns are all set up properly. However, after creating every campaign, AdWords asks you to proceed to the payment process even though I want to continue making the campaigns first.
10) AdWords doesn’t show the history of each keyword’s quality score. Unless a PPC manager keeps a manual record of the AdWords quality score, you will not know whether the keyword’s quality score has improved or worsened. This is why I wish I had a photographic memory.
11) The new Google AdWords Editor 11 has had some criticism since its release, as it still requires PPC account managers to login to the AdWords interface to add callout extensions, use the keyword planner and set up ad scheduling.
12) This problem annoys me more because I want to know the reason behind it. In the Google AdWords ad preview and diagnosis tool, you can search for the ads to make sure it is showing up in Google so you don’t accrue impressions for the live ads. The preview shows a warning stating that the page is a tool for AdWords advertisers to test their ads. I would love to know whether someone actually got lost in the AdWords ad preview and diagnosis tool assuming that it was actually the live Google, therefore they had to contact Google regarding why they couldn’t search properly.
