William Charlwood

If you are looking for an AdWords Consultant there are a few things you need to check beyond his/her basic competence and familiarity with the AdWords system before you hire.

1. Is he/she capable of understanding the business you work in, beyond simply being able to research keywords?
   
2. Can he/she demonstrably show that he/she understands what impact on your sales, profits and cashflow that advertising with Google is going to have?
   
3. Can they explain, (without looking at this page about AdWords ROI) why ROI is NOT the prime measure of an account’s performance? (If they can’t do this, they don’t understand any business let alone yours!)
   
4. Can you get in touch with them easily by email and ‘phone when you want?
   
5. Can they explain why the amount you pay for a broad match keyword click can vary dramatically and why your ad ranking for a broad match keyword may vary dramatically too?
   
6. VERY IMPORTANT: Do they insist that they “own” the contents of your account so that they demand the right to delete everything from your account when you stop using their services? This is underhand practice.
   
7. Do they possess ALL these key skills?

• • • copywriting
    • understanding consumer motivations
    • understanding ad distribution and associated market behaviours
    • understanding account structures - Campaigns and Ad Groups and, specifically, what controls are available at what level
    • statistical analysis capability and an ability to analyse data and decide what is statistically relevant and what’s not
    • keyword research capability- knowledge of research tools, what they do and how to use their results
    • familiarity with the AdWords editor
    • knowledge of conversion tracking - what it is, where it works and where it doesn’t
    • ability to integrate AdWords with Google Analytics - and how to work with different traffic sources
    • ad scheduling - basic and advanced
    • negative keyword utilisation to control which ads your target market sees as well as who doesn’t see them at all
    • the difference between negative phrase and negative exact match keywords
    • geotargeting capabilities and how to exploit them to the full
    • time-dependent account optimisation
    • billing cycles
    • competitor research
    • keyword types
    • content-targeting
    • the AdWords pricing model
    • relationship between AdWords/PPC and SEO and precisely why you don’t need to optimise your AdWords landing pages for SEO.

There are a bunch more too but that’s a quick list. Copywriting alone is a skill that can takes years to develop.

Over and above this list your AdWords consultant needs to understand how businesses work, the lifetime value of a new customer, cashflow issues, impact on margins of operational gearing. They also need the ability to work with you closely so that the goals for the AdWords account you are managing are aligned as closely as possible with those that will maximise profitability. Check out this article on Business Analysis and AdWords optimisation to see how a deep understanding of business puts perspective on the role of an AdWords Consultant.

Do you want to see more interesting ads on sites you visit?

Google thinks you do so it has introduced what is essentially a time dimension to its AdSense program.  AdSense at the moment just displays ads that are related to the content of the web page that the ads are on. Google’s interest-based advertising system will now determine which ads to show on the basis of your individual browsing history as well as the content of the page you are on. So it is taking into account sites you’ve visited in the past as well as the site you are currently on to select AdSense ads from its inventory.

This does raise privacy issues and Google is being open about this and allowing you to opt out of its interest based advertising system by setting your own Ads Preferences.

Hopefully a little local and temporal difficulty with Google Docs this morning as one of my AdWords Management clients ‘phoned to asked me where a spreadsheet we are sharing had gone. Sure enough, when I looked into Google Docs, it was totally blank. A quick scout round the support forums showed that we weren’t the only ones with this problem. Curiously, and thankfully!, the data seems to be in place because I did manage to download a pdf version as a safety measure (although no formulae of course).

Generally I’m finding that I’m using Google Docs more and more but this episode will undoubtedly dent the confidence people have in the system. I like the idea of cloud computing but I do like to be able to rely on accessing my data when I want it. However, this is the first problem I’ve suffered from and provided the data is secure (and it seems to be) then I’ll definitely carry on using the Google Docs system, especially now that you can apply CSS style sheets to docs to make them look smart.

AdWords Management