Google needs to give us real-time stats

by Sapphire (March 10, 2005)

So I’m running my first AdWords campaign, trying to get my feet wet and see how this works. And I’m thinking I must be missing something, because it says the stats can be up to three hours behind. Holy…! But it turns out it’s not just me.

See, the way AdWords works, you set a daily spending maximum, then a CPC max. Say you want to spend $5/day for 10 days, just to see how your site works. Fine! In theory.

In reality, Google just doesn’t show your ad. You can sit there and watch, and they aren’t showing it. When you click around looking for what to do to fix that, they suggest raising your daily spending budget to what THEY recommend. Which is a holy guacamole lot more than $5/day.

So you raise the spending limit to $100, and it says that’ll do. It starts serving. And you think, “I’ll just check in every half hour to make sure it doesn’t run me up to $100 in two hours.”

Slight hiccup with that plan - the stats aren’t real time, so you can’t know for sure what you’ve already spent at any given moment.

Now, given that my site isn’t likely to bring down the building with traffic anytime soon, how does this work for someone with a really hot product? Answer: it’s a gamble. It’s not business: Google has set it up like Roulette, on purpose. It’s not meant to be good for you; it’s meant to confuse you into being good for them.

And don’t even get me started on AdWords fraud: people clicking competitors ads to run out their budget on bad traffic. People running these links through incentivized programs. Etc.

I cannot for the life of me see how AdWords is good for a serious business. How does this happen, that something this crazy gets this big, and there’s no competition? Is the net really just a joke, and no place for serious business people?

Or maybe offline businesses are no more sensible, and I just don’t have enough experience to realize it.

Posted in PPC
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