A lot of small businesses are looking to advertise on Google and are facing a crucial choice: AdWords or AdWords Express?
Advertising on Google is a great way to drive traffic to your website. If you are thinking about doing it, we suggest you to read the Adwords guide to structure your accounts.
It’s been a while now, but Google has launched AdWords Express to help people without much experience build campaigns, as well as manage them. While AdWords Express is definitely easier to use than AdWords, not everything is as simple as Google pretends.
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What is described above as a relatively simple process is actually quite complicated. If you’ve never done a PPC (pay-per-click) campaign, it’s super easy to get lost in all the statistics. Here are the ones you need:
In addition to paying attention to these parameters, it is important to keep an eye on their evolution over time, at least every week.
Since many small businesses don’t have the time or expertise to successfully run AdWords campaigns, Google created AdWords Express to automate the processes.
AdWords is essentially a keyword platform on which you can bid. When you create a campaign, you have to enter specific keywords of your product or service.
That way, when people search for those keywords on Google, your ad appears. When they click on your ad, they are redirected to a specific link, usually a relevant page on your website, not just the homepage.
You only pay when there’s a click on your ad (hence the term “Pay-Per-Click”).
On the surface, the two products look alike:
It even looks like AdWords Express is superior to Adwords. Everything is automated and there’s a solution if you don’t have a website.
All that seems to be missing are ads on Google Network sites and advanced ad formats.
As mentioned above, there are 4 different match types you can target when running a Google ad. What this table doesn’t tell you is that AdWords Express is default to broad match (the worst way to target keywords).
We appear on terms that are too broad, and it’s almost impossible to control the search terms related to our ads.
Based on our experience and other research we’ve done recently, our clients are asked to take the time to understand the full version of AdWords and abandon Adwords express. PPC advertising is simply too complex to leave it to Google to manage a campaign for us.
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