Google adwords is the flagship product of Google Inc, and it is the biggest online advertising platform. Google generates more than 20 Billion US dollars via Google adwords. And yet it is probably the easiest advertising tool to use, you can set up an account with $5, choose targeting country and fill credit card information in, then choose your keywords and landing pages, write an ad copy and that’s it. Literally it can be finished with in 10 mins, super simple!

google adwords tax calculator

Today, I read a post on SEObook and found out this tool designed by ppcblog – Google Adwords Tax Calculator. It attracted my attention immediately. With my experience of managing multiple adwords campaigns containing tens of thousands of keywords and thousands of ad groups, I thought I should be pretty good. So I gave this tool a try, and I still waste 15% of my budget. Of course it might be inaccurate, but I think I should write a post to point out where should Adword newbies be careful about their accounts, Google Adword is easy to use and track ROI, and yet it is also very easy to waste money on it. (Otherwise how can Google earn $20,000,000,000 from it annually?)

Where are the easiest parts on Google Adwords you can waste your money?

This is a post about paid search in SEM. How do you know if your paid search keywords are really used by customers? Do you know there is a big chance that you are wasting money on Google Adwords for useless keywords and you don’t even know? You might say this to against me, “We have well-organised Ad groups with two-words and three words phrase-match keywords that have high quality scores. We also put some negative keywords that prevents irrelevant clicks, the Return-on-Investment(ROI) is positive, therefore we are satisfied.” Well, you did a good job, but you could do a BETTER job if you know exactly what your targeting audiences are searching.

customer's exact google search query

Most of the Google Adwords advertisers have two things in common:

1. Start a new campaign with Brainstorming some keywords and then use Google Adwords Keyword Tool to expand the keywords list, it will more or less contain some guesses even if they are experienced. (I will explain why experience is not always working later)

2. Don’t know how to track exact paid keywords that customers use.

In order to better target right audiences and understand their search behaviors, you have to know what search queries your customers type in search engines.  So let us resolve these two problems one by one.