Google Adwords PPC Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

1. I type my keyword 'blue widgets' into Google by I don't see my Ad?  Why not?

Salsa manage customer campaigns based on a Google click budget which is spread evenly across each day of the month.  If you are spending a limited amount each day on Google, then chances are your budget for the day may have already been used by the time you perform the search.   If you try the search early in the morning, you will probably see your ad.   If you have a very small monthly advertising budget (ie < $1000 per month), and you are in a competetive industry where lots of people search for products like yours on Google, chances are you daily budget may be consumed very quickly by clicks / website visits and so you may not see your ads if you are logging on during the day and searching for your ads.   If you would like login details so you can login to your Google Campaign and see your daily clicks and how many times your ad is shown, contact Salsa and we can enable this access for you. 

2. I am targetting my ads to customers in Melbourne, but when my brother types my keywords into Google he can't see my ads, but I'm in Melbourne too - and I can?  What's wrong?

Google utilise IP address to implement their location based targetting of advertisements.   Unfortunately IP address is not completely foolproof as a method of identifying the location of internet users.   Some users may be located in Melbourne, but be using an Internet Service providers whose network or computers are located outside Melbourne.   Therefore sometimes IP addresses aren't completely accurate as a method of identifying the user's location.  

What this means is that a small % of users based in a particular location may not see your ads if they are targetted at that location.   Don't panic - usually most users in that location WILL see your ads, and usually enough to make a campaign effective in targetting that location.   If you want complete coverage of an Australian city however - you may want to consider targetting all Australian users, and then using the wording of the ad to make it clear that your business services that city only.  

3. My ad is showing up at the bottom of the list of sponsored links - can you get me to the top?

Bidding a higher price for clicks against a certain keyword will raise your ad position.   Salsa manage your campaign to maximise the number of visitors that you get each month for your allocated budget, and therefore sometimes your ad wont be listed right at the top of the sponsored links - it may be down the list, or on page 2 or 3.  If appearing at the top of the ads is critical for your business for branding or other reasons, let us know and we can increase your bids (keeping in mind that you will get less people to your website for your budget, if you bid a higher price for clicks). The issues involved in setting bid prices can be complex, however we recently wrote an article about why using a lower bid price can be particularly effective if you have a limited advertising budget .

4. What if my competitor is clicking on my ads all the time and using up my click budget?

Advertisers clicking on competitors ads can happen, however Google and the other search engine companies have quite sophisticated technical and manual processes in place for detecting click fraud, and they err on the side of not charging advertisers where clicks are assumed invalid.   The following is an extract from Google's documentation on the topic:

"Proactive detection happens before advertisers contact us. Our goal is to proactively detect as many invalid clicks as possible. Despite the media attention on click fraud in 2006, our rate of reactively detected invalid clicks remained extremely low (less than 0.02% of all clicks), even as advertisers sent us more cases. This low rate can be attributed to the significant number of invalid clicks we detect proactively.  Our filters are particularly apt at detecting invalid clicks due to their flexibility. Rather than ignoring a fixed percentage of clicks, they react to various traffic patterns and indications of click fraud attacks."

In Salsa's experience, advertisers often have concerns about click fraud due to their daily click budget being consumed quickly.   In most cases, this is more likely to be due to click prices being high, combined with customer daily google ad spend being low - and therefore their daily clicks are consumed quickly (see (3) above).  If required, Salsa can request an investigation of click fraud from Google on your behalf, but usually we are able to analyse conversion or inquiry rates resulting from your campaign, and keywords which are attracting clicks in order to identify whether any obvious indications of click fraud are present in your campaign.