Checking AdWords Once a Day. Give Me a Break!

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.