Google is a brilliant business which provides its users with simple and clear systems enabaling them to get to where they want to be on the web quickly and efficiently. So why is it that they fail on providing adwords users with accurate information?

You will quickly realise when setting up a google adwords campaign that google provides you with estimates on traffic for the keywords you are using. Lets imagine that we want to advertise some PPC software. An obvious keyword to add to your campaign first would be “PPC Software”. Now lets imagine that google predicts that this will produce 1000 clicks per day costing X amount. In reality are you going to get this many clicks? From my personal experience it is very hit or miss.

So why do Google privide this information for their users? I would imagine the biggest reason is to give the users a rough idea as to the potential of the keywords they are thinking of using. Therefore these statistics should be taken lightly.

In all fairness the estimates provided are probably the best Google can produce as certain factors are out of their control. The main factors that cannot be taken into consideration are as follows:

1. Advert text - Calls to action etc can greatly affect the clickthrough rate of an advert.
2. Relevancy - If the advert is not relavant to what the user is looking for you are not going to get many clicks and the ones you do get might not be useful resulting in wasted advertising money.
3. Existing brand awareness - Well known brands can draw attraction even in PPC adverts.

Because of factors like that you can see why Google would find it hard to provide accurate estimates.

Now this is not a Google bashing article as I actually believe that they provide an excellent platform for searching and advertising on. I am pointing out a flaw that highlights the importance of monitoring and testing your keyword campigns to realise there full potential.

I currently use a custom written piece of software to track and monitor my campaigns but this can easily be done on a budget using Microsoft Excel or even cheaper by using the Open Office spreadsheet software. If you are going to opt for a spreadsheet then make sure that you can view all of the essential results side by side so that you can easily spot the performance and any future drops in effectiveness. If your a little bit savy or willing to put in the research hours you can learn little coding tricks to put in the spreadsheets to perform calculations and automatically display the most important pieces of information.

There are many reasons why racking and monitoring your campaigns is important but they are all about maximising profits and reducing wasted advertising money.

If anyone needs any more specific help with monitoring there PPC campigns then please feel free to drop me a comment or send me an email and I will write a post to help you with your problem.