One of the big selling points that Google give to potential AdWords advertisers is how their platform "levels the playing field" and allows small and medium businesses to compete with the big boys. And this is true. You can set up your ad campaign, select your keywords, set a bid and enter your credit card details and away you go... someone searches for "blue widgets" and your ad appears right next to the ad from Big Blue Widget Corporation. So, yes, you are competing with them and Google has levelled the playing field. Or have they? The truth is, they haven't...

I can just about remember my first Adwords campaign. It was for my own business and I was spending my own money. In my opinion, this is the best way to learn the platform - there is no better motivation to learn the subtleties (and not so subtle pitfalls) than knowing that every wasted click is money straight out of your own pocket. In fact, for everyone wondering how best to learn AdWords, I would always suggest they look to get some skin in the game. Looking back, I now realise how green I was and how much money I probably wasted, but that is not the theme of today's article. Instead, today, I am considering the way in which the KPI's change over time as your Adwords knowledge develops...

We all appreciate the importance of keyword Quality Score in AdWords. We know it is something we should be striving to improve with the aim of having 10/10 scores for all our main keywords. But, whilst we understand the importance, in practice QS is still something of a mystery...

A couple of years ago we were discussing bid adjustments by device on the weekly #ppcchat twitter tag, and I posted a screenshot to voice my frustration at the inability to split desktop and tablet traffic in my AdWords campaigns. Others were equally frustrated by the inability to effectively target mobile only traffic - you had to implement a clumsy workaround which would reduce mobile traffic, but not eliminate it. The solution seemed so simple - have a "base" bid and then allow all device types to have a bid adjustment - that you had to conclude that Google had simply decided that they knew best and that we were not going to able to filter our traffic the way we wanted to. And then Google announced a change...

There's a strange thing that sometimes happens with CPA bidding in Google AdWords. Following a few days of fluctuation, the ad impressions drop to almost nothing. There doesn't appear to be any change to the settings and the billing is OK - so what's going on? In most cases it appears that Google's algorithm simply gets nervous - you might even say it panics! To understand the phenomenon in practice, we have to understand how CPA bidding works in principle...

Imagine for a moment that you are buying ads in a magazine. Full page, full colour ads. Nice. The salesman at the magazine tells you that you're getting a great deal. For only $10,000 dollars your ad is going to be in 150,000 magazines. You think that's a great price. You book the ad, give them your money and run back to your office to wait for the phone to start ringing off the hook. But the results are less than spectacular, and you start to question why. So you get back in touch with the salesman. "How many magazines does my ad appear in?", you ask. "150,000," is the happy reply "but we actually only sell 50,000 of them, the rest we just recycle and pulp." Would you be upset? You betcha. Welcome to the Google AdWords display platform...

Recently I was asked whether or not I felt an agency should grant a client access to their AdWords account. I was somewhat baffled by the question. The notion that an agency would consider not allowing a client access to their own AdWords account is, to me, absurd; but there are many agencies who neither grant access, nor run the account in their client's name. There are essentially two models. In the first the AdWords account is in the client's name. Under this model the billing is, generally, between the client and Google, with the client's credit card being billed directly by Google and the agency billing a management fee separately. With the second model the agency owns the accounts and invoices the client for a combination of ad spend and management fee, passing Google's share on to them. There is no real difference between these models in terms of the ad spend and the management fee, just in terms of the order in..

We have been experimenting with Call Only Campaigns in Google AdWords. Call Only Campaigns are like regular search campaigns but they are only eligible to run on mobile phones. Basically, a user sees your ad, clicks on it and their phone app opens with your number pre-dialled. And it doesn't matter where a user clicks. There is a Call Now button on the ads, but wherever they click, the result is the same - they are primed to place the call. At this point we find many people panic. They simply weren't ready to place a call to your business. They were expecting to be redirected to your website and then have the opportunity to browse your offer, find out a little more about your company and then... maybe... give you a call. Instead, most people simply drop their phone and wonder how they did that.... "Surely I didn't hit the Call Now button, or did I ??"..

Google Analytics recently introduced Smart Goals. Smart Goals are goals that Google themselves configure within your Analytics account to measure the activity of your best visitors. This is based on visitor behaviours such as the time they have spent on the site, the number of pages they have visited and an undoubtedly bewildering array of other signals that Google have doubtless determined to indicate desirable behaviour from their analysis of user data. And, let's face it, Google have more data than... well, than anyone. So these goals will be the best we can get, right? Nope. Not even close...