AdWords myths: understanding the AdWords auction

Over the past few weeks, we’ve covered a few common areas of confusion related to AdWords, including billing and spending, and keywords. This week, we’d like to wrap up this blog series by offering some helpful info on the AdWords auction.

If you have questions about how the AdWords auction works, a great place to start is with this introductory video from Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist.

(click to watch on YouTube)

One of the most important factors in deciding your ad’s position within the auction is its Quality Score. To learn more about how Quality Score is defined, and how to improve it, you can visit the Search Ads Quality Getting Started Guide.

Finally, remember that if you’d like to understand how bidding can affect your ad's performance in the auction, you can use the bid simulator. It will provide you with click, cost, and impression data estimating how your ad could have performed over the last seven days had you used a different bid.

These resources should give you more insight into how the AdWords auction works.

This concludes our AdWords Myths series. We hope it’s helped clarify a few things you may have been wondering about AdWords.

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew

AdWords Myths - common misperceptions about keywords

We’re back to dispel a few more of the myths you may have heard about AdWords. If you missed the first AdWords myths post last week, check it out to learn about common misconceptions around AdWords billing and spending.

Today we’ll cover three myths related to keywords and click-through-rate:

Myth # 3: Your conversion rate can impact your quality score

Fact: The conversion rate of your ads does not affect your quality score. Some advertisers using AdWords conversion tracking mistakenly believe that they should set an easy conversion event on their landing pages to artificially boost their conversion rates. In reality, this won't have any effect on their quality score and will simply make it harder to measure the true value of their AdWords investment.

Myth # 4: The AdWords keyword tool suggests keywords to use

Fact: The keyword tool doesn’t make any kind of recommendations about which keywords you should be using. The keyword tool just analyzes related queries that might be of benefit to you and displays them. It's up to you to decide which keywords you want to include in your account.

You should always assess the tool’s results in the context of your advertising goals. When you do so, the keyword tool can be a helpful way of finding new, meaningful keywords, including potentially profitable ones you aren’t currently using and those that you might have excluded as negative keywords in order to protect your click-through-rate.

Myth # 5: Upper and lower case letters in AdWords keywords matter

Fact: The AdWords system doesn't distinguish between uppercase and lowercase letters.

• “NYC” is the same as “nyc”
• “Android Phone” is the same as “android phone”

For the sake of simplicity, we recommend that you enter all of your keywords as lowercase letters.

Check back in with us next week for the truth behind myths related to the AdWords auction!

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

AdWords Myths – separating the truth from the fiction

There's lots of misinformation floating around the web about the way AdWords works, and our AdWords support teams get to hear most of it. Since many of the same issues seem to keep popping up again and again, we thought we’d run a blog series to help you separate the myths from the facts. We’ve tried to capture the most persistent of them here, but remember, if you ever have any AdWords questions, you can always pop over to the AdWords Help Center or AdWords Help Forum for an answer.

Myth # 1: Spending money on Google AdWords will influence my website’s ranking in Google's free search results.

Fact: Google AdWords and Google’s free search results are entirely independent of one another. Spending money on AdWords won’t impact your ranking in Google's free search results. Similarly, cancelling your AdWords account won’t lead to your website being banned from Google’s search results. If you’d like to learn more about what does go into ranking your website in Google search results, check out Google Webmaster Central.

Myth # 2: Google AdWords has declined my credit card.

Fact: Google itself doesn’t actually decline credit cards. The decline usually takes place at your bank, your card-issuing institution, or its payment processor.

If your credit card gets declined, your first step should be to check and make sure you’ve filled out the Billing Preferences page correctly. Some common mistakes include:

• Missing or invalid credit card number or security code
• Missing or invalid expiration date
• Missing or invalid billing address and/or telephone number

Once you’ve gotten that squared away, make sure that there aren’t any problems with your card itself. Be on the lookout for issues with your:

• Credit limit
• Maximum amount per debit
• Number of possible debits within a certain period

If any of these are too low for your AdWords account, contact your bank or card-issuing institution. You should also be sure that your card allows for online debits and automatic debits.

Next week we’ll be discussing AdWords clicks and keywords myths, so stay tuned!

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew