This web site helps people looking for practical assistance with AdWords. We’re all top contributors on the AdWords Help Forum, Google’s User To User, Voluntary Contribution forum for AdWords help – or we’ve been picked by AdWords Help Forum Top Contributors, for our deep understanding and helpful approach.
You can meet us, in “Your AdWords Experts“.
We operate this site for two purposes. When we write answers in the AdWords Help Forum, we can’t post graphics and formatting is severely limited. This format lets us write answers with graphics and layout – which should make some of the answers easier to understand.
Our other reason is shamelessly commercial. We’re looking for your business. We think that demonstrating our competence here, will make you more likely to seek our paid assistance for solving deeper problems, or managing your AdWords account. Some of us have other specialties, and we will co-operate to solve bigger problems, from web site design, conversion improvement, implementing and using Google Analytics, web server log file analysis, effective use of social media, SEO and so on.
Check us out. We don’t bite. Not unless you really, really want us to.
Been using Google AdWords for almost a month and a half. So far with very little results. Had some click thru’s but no calls or anything else from it. nearly 26,000 impressions but only 12 clicks. Cost per click on several of the locally targeted keywords are ridiculously overpriced, like 7.50-12.50 per click!
I’m also trying to figure out how to appear in the sponsored area at the top of the page instead of only to the left.
I don’t have much left in my budget but id like to at least get a price for optimizing my AdWords/SEO and also managing my account.
Thanks
Hi Dave – we’ve removed identifying details from your comment. You should receive at least two proposals after we have asked you some more details about what you are tying to achieve and how you measure success.
I posted to adwords forum the other day. I was jsut saying that it would be great if Google would provide a human being along with the big fat invoice.
I don’t expect to be an expert any time yesterday, but a few minutes on the phone would save me hours of reading and figuring and lots of $$, I think.
I am not averse to paying for help. My point with Google is that for the money, I would expect it. But if not Google, maybe you guys! But I haven’t found anythin on this site that says what that might cost.
My goal is simple. I want to capture all the traffic for people looking to buy a house in St Louis.
Please email or call: email above; cell: 314-614-4377
HI Damian – each of the AdWords Help Forum Top Contributors runs different prices for different services. You probably should be looking towards Kim, Tom or Rich for best service for a US based realtor. FWIW, I do a fair amount of teaching of in-house marketing staff, and I reckon it takes about two hours to cover the absolute basics to a depth that won’t result in disappointed spending, and up to two days to properly cover the main aspects for a business large enough to have an in-house internet marketing team. AdWords has a lot of different features. Just setting up a single city US realtor probably requires at least two campaigns, and could (depending on the need to control and manage spending) easily use twelve campaigns. Costs are kept down with two, spend and ROI should be managed more effectively with twelve. Vastly different cost basis to set up and to manage!
Damian, I’d ask for some understanding on your part since this joint blog is a pretty new initiative, it was started in December 2008. From time to time we are discussing what kind of integrated paid services we could be offering via this site and trying to check them against Google’s corporate expectations, via our own special communication channels to the AdWords Team. Things are rather chaotic at the moment and I don’t expect such services to go live before autumn. One of the possibilities is an AdWords program for all those affiliates because demand seems to be extremely high.
Time will tell. At the moment, however, you may visit the websites of the participating authors and check out whether the services offered there meet your expectations. (Select the Prrofessional Services menu, first off.)
Several days ago, I opened a new Google AdWords account with multiple campaigns and ad groups. After two days of not working, I deleted that account, and opened a new one for the same domain name (econoSCANS.com). In the new account I had one campaign, and it worked almost immediately. Then I added several more domain names, and my site stopped being published.
Throughout this ordeal, all of my current campaigns and ad groups show as being “active”. However, they are not publishing. I’ve tried pausing and resuming all of them, and still not published.
I’ve contacted Google’s “contact us”, but have yet to hear from anyone.
Can you please help?
Hi George – You’ve done several things that could make Google suspicious about what you are doing. I’ve forwarded your message to the AdWords Help Experts – I expect you’ll hear from one or more of them, soon.
Does Google Adwords allow office site URL’s? For some reason, Google is not accepting my URL
@Hal – Do you mean Microsoft OfficeLive sites? With a custom domain name?
Let me explain further. On Microsoft Office Small Business (the people hosting my site), for my http://www.com url, its says that redirecting traffic from that URL to the office live long url is “redelegation pending.”
I don’t know what it will take to just have office live just relocate it but for adwords, there is one thing I find interesting.
The site is viewed on two key words, so the URL is ok for that, but for the right site of the page where the ads are, it says that the URL is not valid. When I try to retype the URL on the adwords campaign page, google is tricked for a second into thinking it’s a different url, then my site is listed on the right, but then minutes later it goes back to saying I can’t be viewed because I have an invalid URL.
I hope this makes sense. I understand if it doesn’t. Is there anyone at Google I can speak to?
Thanks for your help,
Hal
Hello JezC,
Well, I am now on GoDaddy and just designed the site yesterday. Now I can’t find myself on any one of the search terms no matter how high I bid. My web design guy said he’ll input in some “analytics” on each page of my site and that should fix the problem as to why nobody has been able to click on my site. Even Google adwords is telling me if I want my money back or want to stop the service – and they still think that URL is not valid on one area of the adwords site when it asked me for the URL.
As you can see I know nothing about computers. I just wish that Google had some phone support, but they’re too big for that I guess. I just don’t know why my site is not popping up when I type in my search words. How high do I have to bid?
Thanks,
Hal
@Hal – where to start? So many questions!
Do you want to manage AdWords for yourself? Then you need to learn how it works. Google’s own AdWords Learning Center offers a free course that leads to certification. It typically takes between 40 hours and 200 hours to run through all the material in that course, depending on how much Internet and Marketing background you have. And you still need to develop some experience – the course is a partial substitute for the practice of effective advertising.
If you don’t want to invest in learning, there’s plenty of professional consultants and agencies who can run AdWords for you – all the AdWords experts here, for example!
If you want to learn AdWords while having an agency getting it working, there’s a few agencies that will teach you while managing it, so you can take over later. My agency has done that – but personal tailored tutoring while managing the account is more expensive than just managing.
There are reasons for choosing each strategy; businesses that focus effort on their business, tend to outsource non-core activities, for example. Businesses with low budgets and low revenue expectations tend to want to learn for free and self-manage.
You should learn about Display URLs versus Destination URLs – that probably accounts for your problem with disapproved URLs, though there are a few other less likely causes. You haven’t given the full text of the error, so diagnosing the precise cause is difficult.
Google Analytics doesn’t “allow clicks”, it allows you to measure user behaviour on the site, and determine, to some extent, how users found your site. The clicks will happen without Analytics – you just won’t know what users are doing without it. Like AdWords, Google Analytics needs significant learning in order to make it make more sense than simply knowing that you have activity. You *can* use Analytics to help drive understanding of what makes the site work for users, but that needs a significant investment in learning, practice and experience.
Finally, there are many reasons why you may not see your adverts. Far, far too many to enumerate in a comment. A handful of the most likely:
Diagnosing the specific issues will need a lot more detail. Sitenames, keywords, URLs, precise messages from Google, etc. Much, much easier and faster with access to the account
JezC,
I will send you an email now to inquire about services.
Thanks,
Hal
>> Our other reason is shamelessly commercial.
I loved this comment
Very funny.
Great site guys. Very useful information. Thank you. (And you deserve all the business you get
)
I keep the same, destination URL not working, error. My URLs work everytime I click on them, how do I fix this?
Carden.buildlastingsuccess.com/goland9
Carden.buildlastingsuccess.com/goland6
Hi Matt – a quick look using a robot shows that Google is correct – I suspect that your server may be rejecting robots, perhaps something to do with cookie handling or rejecting crawls.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response…
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
…
2009-07-03 13:32:58 ERROR 404: Not Found.
Hi Experts.
Up until today, I considered myself pretty handy with AdWords but now I’m stumped. Happily, I’ve found you!
I woke up to a 1/10 landing page quality score that has taken a successful program offline. Even the name of the company is too low in keyword quality now to trigger an ad. And this account delivered hundreds and sometimes thousands of conversions to happy downloaders on a daily basis.
Google chat support says a specialist will review the ‘bots’ decision. But I have a hard time just twiddling my thumbs hoping for the best. Any suggestions you have are welcome.
And I’ve no problem supporting your shamelessly commercial needs either.
Thanks.
Hi Brian – your best bet is probably a dialogue with MrsC; she’s been handling a lot of these problems recently. I’ve let her know about your comment here.
Hey JezC, great site of yours!
Keep the hard and valuable work!
My question is a pretty simple one and is related to the mix AdWords/Analytics. Why the same amount of inbound clicks showing on AdWords has not relation with the less amount of clicks showing on Analytics?
Sometime even a campaign results on AdWords won’t get shown on Analytics.
What your thoughts are at this point?
Rob
@Roberto – thanks. If there’s problems with measurements, they usually boil down to a few causes. Is there a redirector involved that is stripping off the tracking parameters? Are there filters that might remove tracked clicks? Are users being directed to pages that don’t have the tracking code (e.g. a lot of 404 pages don’t have tracking codes put on to them)? IME, Google *overdelivers* clicks, in order to make sure that clicks eliminated by the invalid click detection software, are replaced by valid clicks – which creates the minor annoyance of trying to work out which clicks you paid for and which came free, on what keyword!