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Google's Magical Money Machine
June 22, 2016

Google's Magical Money Machine

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with AdWords

AdWords is the client software for the primary lead generation channel for our organisation. It is used by an in-house PPC team of 3 members within the marketing department. Is is used as a necessity to manage AdWords campaigns which in turn are critical to generating lead flow for the business.
  • It provides a wealth of data essential to good PPC management. This includes impression share data, quality score, clicks, impressions, conversion tracking and so on.
  • It is fairly familiar to anybody who has worked in the PPC industry understands its functions and metrics are therefore as close as you can get to a universal language.
  • Our organisation is often approached to take part in betas for new functions such as new demographic targeting tools etc., which we are able to leverage to great effect.
  • Observing differences between ad performance on a large scale can often requires time-consuming manipulation. There is no easy export function which you can utilise.
  • Removed campaigns, keywords etc. can still visually persist within the client, even years after they were last active and removing them requires a filter which could perhaps be set up as default.
  • The geo-location is very useful, but when radius targeting for smaller areas, it might be useful to be able to manipulate the circle and move it around on the map rather than just adding size and centre location.
  • Scripts seem to hold a lot of potential, but there isn't an easy room in for those with little scripting experience. Perhaps some basic scripts provided by Google themselves which can be edited would be helpful.
  • AdWords drives around a third of all revenue via leads for the organisation as a whole. It is an essential part of the company's marketing outlay in a highly competitive market.
  • It is a highly expensive form of marketing, and that cost is always rising. Cost per clicks is known to increase by double figure percentages every year.
  • Currently AdWords spend is managed to stay within the overall marketing cost-of-sale targets and therefore reaches parity with offline channels etc.
AdWords is obviously dominant in terms of lead generation compared to Bing due to the power and popularity of its search engine. Beyond this, it often leads the field in innovation and Bing is forced to follow to remain relevant. That said, Bing is much cheaper in terms of CPCs and is pushed as hard as possible in our organisation. Account management from the AdWords teams at Google is also far superior to Bing.
AdWords is basically essential for lots of companies but the decision on whether to use the client primarily instead of a third party software like DoubleClick comes down a lot to the size of the budget and usage of other search engines. For very large companies, the need to make en masse bid adjustments can make AdWords insufficient. That said, any company which spends even a moderate sum on AdWords should have a PPC professional overseeing the spend, and they should in turn be very familiar with and often use AdWords. For very small companies, control can be handed over to Google themselves to run.