I’ve heard many search engine marketing specialist / experts give blanket recommendations to check Google AdWords once or more a day to make sure your ads are performing to their highest potential. Personally, I feel it’s misleading to give advice like this to the general AdWords audience. Unless you are managing a high transaction volume Web site or are in a highly competitve market for keywords then there really isn’t a compelling reason to check AdWords more then once a week. I suspect, but I have zero data other then intuition to believe that the bulk of AdWords users are small businesses with low-transaction sites. Sure, if your business is ecommerce related or receives a high level of transactions per day then the advice to check daily makes sense.

Here is my general guideline to maintaining Google AdWords. This is assuming that you’ve been running AdWords for more then a few months:

Check once or more a day if:

• Your margins on product sales are tight
• Your geographic scope extends to the National or Global level
• Your site is receiving over 30 orders a day under $50 an order or 5 orders a day over $50. Side note: We have a client who receives 1-3 orders a day over $2k per order and that site is only checked once a week.

Check once per week if:

• You are doing any ecommerce sales
• If you are using Adwords to generate leads

Check it a few times per month if:

• You are interested in shear traffic
• If you aren’t interested in tracking ROI in AdWords

I’m sure there are those who would debate these numbers but I think they provide a more accurate guideline then telling the AdWords user base to check their accounts daily.

Like you, I’ve seen repeat IP addresses visit our sites by clicking on PPC ads. I suspect these repeat visitors who continue to click our ads without moving past our homepage are likely competition driving up our ad costs. I feel that Google and Yahoo should give users the ability to block certain IP addresses from clicking on PPC ads.

Today I had lunch with a colleague from another interactive agency, and the topic of pay-per-click came up. We started into a discussion about the inconsistent emphasis placed on pay-per-click (PPC) over natural rankings. While both of our agencies provide these services to our clients we began to wonder why it seems that 80% of the interactive marketing budgets go to 20% of the search traffic, while only 20% of the budgets are applied to where 80% of the search traffic originates from.

Is it because PPC provides immediate gratification? Is it because natural rankings appear too difficult to affect change? Perhaps a combination of factors? Regardless, I think it is time that people realize that natural rank is not impossible to influence. While I’m not the first person to state the obvious, it needs to be restated. CONTENT IS KING!

Depending on the products or services you offer, PPC might make sense; however free traffic always makes sense. Pull back on your PPC budgets and use that money to hire content writers, ghost bloggers or technical writers. These professionals will get you far more mileage for your online marketing dollars.

Over the years I’ve noticed curious patterns of PPC usage, sometimes I can trace it back to a competitor trying to drum up our charges. Depending on the intensity of the click-fraud I will contact the ad provider asking for a refund. Usually, I receive the standard corporate mantra that their system guards against click-fraud and those illicit clicks will not be charged to my account.

Today we received triple the normal amount of traffic, largely outside of the United States, yet they were searches on very localized terms. The majority of the clicks originated from Overture / Yahoo and ironically today we received a notification from Yahoo that our Overture account will be refilled by charging our credit card another $500 lump sum. That made me think, where are the third-party checks and balances to hold these ad networks to a set of standards that we can all trust?

Technorati Profile