Google AdWords and other paid search marketing (PPC or pay-per-click) platforms including Yahoo! Search Marketing and MSN AdCenter provide very robust administration platforms to allow for a variety of options to be specified when serving ads to searchers and contextual partner sites. Just over the past two years, these systems have become increasingly capable of allowing advertisers to focus their budgets towards keyword phrases that are providing return on their advertising spend. Even with all these capabilities, a lack of testing, research and/or understanding of past performance can make campaigns inefficient.
Google offers one particular option to its AdWords advertisers called “campaign optimizer.” In the past, this was an option that could be found in the campaign level settings page, however Google seems to be pushing their “enhancements” more often within the main dashboard. A recent thread started at WebmasterWorld forums describes this situation, as a user relates seeing messages within his dashboard to the effect of running the campaign optimizer in order to “increase traffic by 17%.”
Is this the right tactic to use? Should advertisers allow Google to enhance their campaigns’ performance? In my opinion it depends on the account. If the owner of the account has the time to run tests and optimize the campaign by themselves, they will likely do at least as well as or better than Google, without having to fear that in Google’s eye’s “optimization = spending the entire daily budget each day.”
Join the discussion at WebmasterWorld forums.
