Google Adwords Express is a simplified version of their advertising platform Google Adwords, aimed at local business and service professionals like dentists and orthodontists. The main benefit of Adwords Express for dentists is the automation and simplicity it offers over the default adwords campaigns. You can get started quickly and do not need professional to setup a Google Adwords Express campaign. Once you have specified a budget, bid, business category and created an ad, Google handles the rest. However, as we look a little deeper, we find that by removing the granular control over keywords and bids, Google has taken away the primary factors that make PPC advertising so effective.
If you are just testing the waters with ppc advertising and what to assess its performance quickly, Adwords Express may be right for you. However, if you are serious about PPC advertising and are willing to allocate a substantial amount of your marketing budget towards it then you must use the full Google Adwords account. Perhaps that is what Adwords Express is meant for – a stepping stone to Google’s full-fledged advertising program.
My main gripe is that Adwords Express will not produce the best ROI. Since most dentist who opt for this program do not have a big budget, they need a high ROI to justify increasing their spend. But if they do not hit right numbers, they may in fact be turned off by PPC advertising altogether. Then as a dental marketing company it becomes difficult for us to convince a dentist, who has had a bad experience with Adwords Express, that PPC advertising is worth doing.
The main reason why search advertising is so effective is because you can show your ad to qualified searchers only by bidding on selected keywords and excluding irrelevant searchers with negative keywords. This means at that a lot of wasted spend is saved and the campaign can be optimized over time as you gain a better understanding of your audience and expand your keyword list. However, in Adwords Express, you are at the mercy of Google’s algoritms as they decide which searcher is qualified to see your ad. You can only choose your service category eg. dentist. and then try to differentiate yourself with your ad. This can often result in a lot of wasted spend.
But, the worst part of Adwords Express is that you cannot do anything to optimize the campaign and to stop wasting money on unqualified clicks. This means that you will be continue to waste money on irrelevant clicks for as long as you are advertising as there is no negative keyword feature to stop your ad from appearing on irrelevant searches. This is where you lose the main advantage of PPC advertising and then it becomes a bit hit and miss like all other forms of advertising.
If you are considering Google Adwords Express, by all means do it but don’t be surprised if the results are ordinary. In that case do not blame search advertising because PPC advertising on Adwords Express is like a bird without wings.
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