This has to be the most useless service Google have come up with yet.
Google offers an ‘Optimized’ option for its PPC campaigns which claims to get the most clicks for your budget. There are no promises that the clicks will make yyou a profit, but I had a leads campaign running that was for a slightly off-the-wall service and had very little idea of what would convert, so I set aside a couple of grand as a test budget and gave it a go.
Two months later and the ‘optimizer’ was still using up less than 1/3 of the allocated budget and was doing weird things like setting the automated bids below the minimum bids so the keywords would never get to see the light of day. I eventually gave up and went back to running things manually and the campaigns started to get some good results, it is now the best-converting traffic to that site which already had some pretty impressive SEO results.
I’m hitting my daily budgets quite frequently but I’m happy with this as I know that we’re at about the limit of the ROI I need.
This morning I get a message from Google trying to get me to up my spend:
“This campaign met its daily budget of GBP £380.00 on 14 of the last 15 days. Increasing the budget to GBP £974.87 would allow the ads to show more often and get approximately 61% more clicks per month.
We look forward to providing you with the most effective advertising available.”
Hmm, so more than double the spend, for just over half the extra traffic is the most “the most effective advertising available”. Not in my world.