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In this Shark Bite, Andrew discusses AdWords Express, its benefits and drawbacks. On one hand AdWords Express is very attractive because it is automatic, in other words, it does it all for you.
On the other hand, this can also mean that you will lose a lot of control over your account. For instance, you will not be able to be as specific with the people you wish to target or the message you wish to promote. The reason for this is that you can’t install any tracking or add negative keywords.
Is AdWords Express good or bad for your business? Weigh the pros and cons by watching the shark bite bellow and find out!
We hope you enjoyed this Shark Bite, if you would like to learn more about AdWords Express, read this blog post by Andrew. See you next time!
Video Transcription
Hi everybody, today we’re going to talk about whether or not AdWords Express is helpful or harmful for small business owners. The benefits behind AdWords express are quite simple and pretty enticing to small business owners. The official selling points are: AdWords Express does all the work. You just select your business category, you write a very, very random ad and then you set a budget. AdWords Express will then select the specific keywords that you will show for automatically. You don’t need a website. You can send the traffic to a Google+ page or you can say or you can only call based on the phone number in my ad. And lastly, you only pay for results. You only pay when somebody clicks your ad gives you a call or does any of the actions that are actually required. So that’s very different from typical advertising. However there are a couple of reasons why AdWords Express typically doesn’t work for small business owners. The first reason why it doesn’t work is also the reason why it’s enticing. It’s automatic. When Google automatically chooses the keywords for your specific business based on a whole business category you will without a doubt be shown for searches that are not relevant for your specific business. I know a lot of different taxi companies, roofers, plumbers, who are in the same category but they don’t do the same things. One might focus more on specific pipe repairs and the other one would focus more on installing fridges or do maintenance on appliances. So without that specific control you can’t really know how to get the most out of AdWords Express. Furthermore, all keywords are BroadMatch, which means that you have no control for you ads are being shown off for. You can’t ad negative keywords so you can’t say I don’t do emergency repairs, I will put in emergency as a negative keyword so my ad will never show up when someone searches for emergency. You can’t do that. You can’t track anything. Without tracking, you can’t know whether or not it’s working or not. I’d like to go back to saying that a low budget, below $500, might be better off with AdWords Express because you can’t really find anybody who are professional and are good AdWords management to manage your account for under $250-$350 a month. So if you only have $500 per month then let’s even say that you have a waste of 10%-30% using AdWords Express, that means that you will “waste” $50-$150, that doesn’t cover how much it costs to hire and AdWords professional. However if you are paying $5000 then you’re wasting between $500-$1500. I’ll tell you right now, if you’re spending $5000 on AdWords Express, any good AdWords manager can improve those results and make it cheaper for you by taking away the waste that ads spend, targeting your ads better and thereby get better results for you. It’s that simple. So at the end of the day if you have a high budget and using AdWords Express I would highly recommend you go with an agency of some sort or go to a course and learn about AdWords management. If you are spending under $500-$600 per month on AdWords Express I would recommend you stick with that. It’s not going to help you that much to hire an agency unless you want to invest more money in it. So that’s my advice to small business owners and as always, if you have any questions, if you have any comments, write them in the comments section below or shoot us an email.
