We’re not showing the keywords here as this is a clients account, but what’s important is to look at he places where Google has marked Below first page bid.  Now look across to the column all the way to the right hand side which is what Google reports as the average placement for the keyword.  Notice the 1.8 for the first line and the 2.1 for the last?

Before you ask, let us assure you that the bids were not recently changed.  Beyond this we searched for the terms and in fact our client’s ad does show on the first page in spite of Google’s status report.

Google is so large and so powerful that it is often assumed that their products don’t make mistakes.  In truth it’s probably the fact they are so large that leads to so many mistakes across so many of their products.  This post though isn’t to pick on Google.  The point we want to make for anyone doing their own Adwords campaigns is to be careful.  Don’t automatically bump up your bid just because of what it says in the status column.  Look all the way across to the average placement column.   Don’t be satisfied here either though, instead go to the tools tab and look under the Ad Preview to make sure that your ad really isn’t showing up on the first page.  Only through these two steps can you ensure that you aren’t over bidding.

It’s hard to imagine a more unfriendly landing page than this one.  I can’t help but imagine that their conversion rate from this campaign is in the tank.

This new tool allows you to compare the traffic, geographical location and top keywords of up to 5 Websites. Want to advertise your widget in California on some influential area blogs, but not sure which would be best put them all in Google Trends and hit go.

Not only that, but since the tool also shows you other sites also visited by the site’s visitors you can use it as brainstorming tool for places to advertise.

On a side note Michael Gray, a well reasoned critic of Google, busts Google for lacking transparency with this tool.  Michael has an excellent point.   You see, Google left itself out of the data set.  It also left a number of its own properties like YouTube out of the data set.  At the same time Google refuses to let other Website owners opt-out.  This is unquestionably wrong for Website owners and ultimately wrong for Google whose very existence (not to mention profits) requires the trust of Internet users.

Now the funny thing is that after I declined the offer to have them take over and manage my Adwords account and before they gave away their company name 1upadwords.com (take a look at that site it’s a real winner and leaves a lot of doubt as to the legitimacy of the claim that they are even a certified Google Advertising Professional) they moved on to trying to sell me a link package where they would spread a link to my website across hundreds of directories. That just about made me burst out laughing. The rep was still pretending to be with Google and offering a service that Google would disapprove of.

Google has made it easy for these people to run this routine with the creation of its Google Advertising Professionals program, but that doesn’t mean you should fall for it. So far, to the best of my knowledge, if you’re a small time advertiser using Adwords you don’t need to expect anyone from Google Inc., to be giving you a call so think hard about the kind of person who is on the other end of the line misrepresenting themselves.

If you want someone else to manage your Adwords account, get online and do some research about companies who manage Adwords campaigns, then talk to several of their clients and only after that think about signing up with them.