What AdWords Express Decides for You

Ten minutes and a category

AdWords Express is Google's simplified version of AdWords for small businesses. You give it the business, the area you serve, a product or service category, one short ad and a budget.

Google does the rest. There are no keyword lists to build, no bids to set and nothing to adjust each week, which is exactly why busy owners choose it.

The setup is quick because the decisions have not gone away. Google makes them instead, and most of them are never shown to you.

That can be a fair trade. It helps to know what was traded.

What Express decides on your behalf

• Which searches show your ad, based on the category you picked.
• What each click costs, with no bid of your own.
• Where the ad appears: Google search, Maps and partner sites.
• When it runs, with no schedule for evenings or weekends.
• How it treats phones, with no separate bid for them.
• How the ad reads, one version, often built from suggestions.

The first is the one that costs money. A category is broad by design, and Google decides which searches belong in it.

A category is not a keyword list

In a standard campaign, someone chooses the words that trigger an ad, decides how loosely they may match, and lists words that must never trigger it, such as free, jobs or courses.

Express starts from a category instead. Google matches it to searches it judges related, and for a specialised business many of those searches are for someone else's work.

Express can show you some of the search phrases afterwards and let you remove the ones that do not fit. By then the clicks have been paid for, and there is no way to block a word in advance.

One ad and one page

An Express ad is one piece of text, sending everyone who clicks to one page, usually the home page.

A standard campaign can split the work into groups: an ad for each service, written for the searches it serves, each leading to the page that describes that service.

It can also test two versions of an ad side by side and keep the better one, and add sitelinks, callouts and call extensions that make the ad larger and more useful.

No hours and no device settings

Express runs whenever people search, until the budget is spent. If the money runs out by early afternoon, the ad is missing when evening searchers look; if it runs at night, calls arrive when nobody can answer.

A standard campaign can be scheduled to the hours someone answers the phone, and bids can be raised or lowered separately for phones, tablets and computers.

For a business that only takes calls during the working day, those two settings alone change where the money goes.

What the reports leave out

Express reports views, clicks and what they cost. It says much less about what happened next: which searches led to a quote request, and which led to nothing.

Linking it to Analytics, with goals set up, helps. A managed campaign goes further, with conversion tracking for forms and calls and a search terms report showing exactly which searches cost money and what each produced.

Without that, the only measure is whether the phone feels busier, which is a poor way to judge a monthly bill.

A worked example

An epoxy flooring installer with a crew of two coats garage floors, basements and the floors of small workshops and commercial kitchens across a group of suburbs.

Last spring the owner set up AdWords Express one evening, picked flooring as the category and chose a monthly budget. Clicks came quickly. Quote requests did not.

The list of search phrases explained it. People had clicked after searching for epoxy resin for crafts and bar tops, garage floor paint kits, hardwood flooring and carpet stores.

The budget was usually gone by early afternoon, and Saturday clicks turned into voicemails while the crew was on a job.

In September he moved the budget into a standard campaign managed by his web company: separate ad groups for garages, basements and commercial floors, keywords built around coating, and negatives such as resin, craft, bar top, carpet and hardwood.

The ads now run on weekdays and Saturday mornings, each leads to the matching service page, and calls and quote forms are counted. The searches it pays for are about floors he coats.

When Express is enough

For some businesses the trade works. A small budget, a business its category describes exactly, a single town and a phone that is always answered all make the missing controls matter less.

It can also serve as a first test of whether people search for what you sell at all.

Even then, read the search phrases once a month and remove the wrong ones. It is the closest thing Express has to a keyword list.

When a managed campaign pays

A managed campaign takes more work, and someone has to do it: building keyword lists, writing an ad for each service, adding negatives every few weeks and reading the conversion figures.

It pays when the budget is large enough for wasted clicks to add up, or when the trade's words mean several things.

It also pays when the business offers distinct services with their own pages, or when calls can only be answered at certain hours.

Most trades meet at least one of those. An installer whose main word is also sold as a craft supply meets several.

The counter-case

Express is not a mistake. For a business spending a few dollars a day in a small market with few competitors, the gain from finer control may be modest, and Express is a reasonable place to start.

The choice deserves a second look as the budget grows, or as soon as the search phrases show money going to other people's work.

At that point the controls of a managed campaign are worth what they cost.

Before next month's budget

1. Open the search phrases in your Express account.
2. Remove every phrase that is not your work.
3. Note what the last three months cost.
4. Link Express to Analytics with goals.
5. Count the calls that came from the ad.
6. Ask for a managed campaign proposal with negatives.
7. Compare the cost per enquiry after three months.

Step one tells you most of what you need to know. If the list is full of searches for other people's work, the category is doing the deciding, and the budget is following it.

A standard campaign also lets you decide whether to keep Google's partner sites, a setting covered in search partner sites in your AdWords campaign.

Frequently asked questions

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