Oi, Google! Leave my PPC Campaign Alone!

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June 27th, 2008 by Click Consult

Do Google interfere with Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns too much? Recently we had Automatic Matching, where Google takes it upon itself to show your ads for keywords not in your keyword list. We also have the three optimisers: 1) the 'CPA Optimiser' (Google alter your bids in order to achieve your conversion targets), 2) the 'Campaign Optimiser' (Google analyse your budget, keywords, ad text and landing page and create a customised proposal for your PPC campaign) and 3) the 'Website Optimiser' (Google constantly re-jig your website landing pages to find out which work best). Most annoyingly of all, Google overrides the way you segregated your ad groups with their 'Ghost Ads'. These are ads that break out of their ad group to show for other ad group keywords, whether they are related or not.

As a PPC Account Manager, it seems that Google is trying to put me out of a job! Obviously it is in Google’s interests to help advertisers as much as possible and to make their PPC campaigns successful. This way, they will continue to advertise on Google and make the company money. However, the cynic in me thinks that a lot of these meddling tools push the money making agenda too far. For example, every Google account is automatically opted into Automatic Matching – it is not optional. This is something that spends more of your money by adding keywords you never asked for and most clients I speak to had never heard of it. Indeed, when Google launched this important feature, they didn’t exactly scream it from the rooftops.

This said, I feel there is a broader point to make here. For me, Google is doing too much and making people lazy when it comes to managing their PPC campaigns. As Google do more and more things for you, people won’t take the time to learn about PPC advertising and what does and doesn’t make it work. They will simply switch everything to Google autopilot and put their feet up. But when things go wrong, when the conversions dry up and cost per conversion rockets, these people won’t have the slightest clue what to do. Unless of course Google come up with yet another interfering beta … a PPC Panic Button!

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