I found an interesting post on the UK Business Forum:
A cautionary tale for anyone new to Google adwords:
I got a call a few days ago from Google offerring the services of one of their adword optimization experts. I had an extensive conversation from one of their Mumbai based “experts” and gave her the go ahead to set up a campaign. (Over the years I have had many such calls but this time I thought “ok, you say you are the experts lets see what you can do”.)
To be honest, before the conversation had concluded I was pretty certain that I would almost certainy not initiate the campaign she was going to set up.
The adwords campaign relates to my very niche self drive car transporter hire business. We hire out car transporters for the purpose of moving cars. That is it. The campaign I suggested to her was to set one up based on our Nottingham location. The band of keywords for this business is very narrow.
The expert asked if she should make the campaign live straight away I declined that offer and asked for it to be paused so that I could review it.
So what did the expert’s campaign set up look like?
Of the 170 search terms I would say maybe 15 related to my business. The rest of the search terms are based on “self drive car hire”
In fact of the 10 ads she devised all bar 2 had “car hire” “car rental” “discount car hire” or “self drive car hire” as the theme. These terms are expensive as they are amongst the most highly searched on terms in the world. One of the terms is “car rental heathrow”!
All the keywords were broad match.
The campaign was set for the display network - unless you pick which sites in the display network to show on this is a short cut to emptying your bank account.
I had specifically stated I was interested in promoting a specific location. The geographical parameters were left at “worldwide”
I finally got someone to get back to me from Google and asked them to review what had been suggested. I received a call back to say that the campaign had been reviewed and it was their opinion that a “wonderfull” and “productive” campaign had been set and “we wish you well with it”.
I understand that novices who setup a new adwords campaign automatically qualify for Google adwords expert help.
One might conclude the campaign set up for me was totally, wholly and utterly self serving for Google and hang the consquences on the client. Alternatively one might take the benign view that this was one single incompetent “expert” whose work was double checked by an equally incompetent “expert”. Either way it would have been an expensive mistake.
Had I been a novice and had taken the expert at her word I would have during the last week have spent £840 on this one campaign. (Their suggested budget level was £120 per day).
The ads were 80% irrelevant.
The keywords were around 90% irrelevant
The campaign should have been set for a geographic area.
There should have been selectivity on what sites in the display network the ads would be found on