Google AdWords™ For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Automating Too Much

Some Google fans will be outraged at some of the omissions in this book, most notably Conversion Optimizer (CO). CO is an advanced AdWords feature that puts Google in charge of your bidding. It's designed to take advantage of Google's brilliant algorithm and unfathomable amounts of data to determine how much to bid in every single scenario to get you maximum return.

In theory, CO can do a much better job of bidding than you can because of its access to data you simply don't have (for example, it might determine that someone searching at 3 a.m. in Champagne Castle, South Africa is twice as likely to convert as someone else searching the very same keyword at noon in Guelph, Ontario).

Maybe someday CO will live up to its potential, and folks like us who insist on manual bid management will end up like John Henry in the folk song, busting our hearts out in futile competition with a superior technology. (If you don't know the reference, ask Watson, the current Jeopardy! champion and a computer.)

We've seen too many cases of CO returning twice the traffic at five times the specified cost per action (CPA). And our friend and colleague Shelley Ellis was shocked when she was charged $88.01 for a single click on a keyword with only two competing ads because of CO's determination of the value of that click to her business. At this point, the control you give up by letting Google manage your bids isn't sufficiently offset by the likely improvement in performance.

Joel has ...