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Today is a big day. We’ve solved a huge problem for AdWords advertisers – and we’re going to save our customers a lot of money, fast.
This problem is close to my heart, because I’ve experienced it myself, and I’ve seen it happen to so many great advertisers. To really understand this problem, I’m going to tell you my own story…
I was amazing at AdWords.
I had worked at Google, starting not long before they IPO’d, helping AdWords customers in Australia. I loved working there. The people were awesome, the products were amazing, and I got to work across some really interesting accounts. It was a new market for Google, so there were only about ten people in the office when I joined. It grew to about one hundred people by the time I left.
When I left Google, it was because I wanted to work more from home, so that I could spend time with my little baby girl. I still wanted a challenge though, something to really sink my teeth into, and found out that a local company was looking for someone to manage their paid search. I knew of the account from my time at Google, and I was excited to work on something of that scale. It was huge.
I was managing one of the world’s largest AdWords accounts and I knew how AdWords worked, maybe better than most people in the world, save the team that actually built it. That came from being part of the small startup team in Google Australia. When I was there, I had to know a lot, because when my customers needed help was exactly when the mothership in Mountain View was offline. I couldn’t just lean over to the next cubicle to ask a question and get an answer.
Managing this one big account in my new job meant my whole day was dedicated to understanding it and the particular PPC landscape it was part of. I loved diving in, reviewing the data, making changes, watching how audiences responded and how that impacted sales.
So I knew AdWords really well and I knew this account like the back of my hand. I mean I really knew my shit.
I’m not saying this to brag, but rather, to emphasize my next point.
I screwed up, big time.
I wasted $20k on AdWords in a single day. Despite how well I knew the system, and how closely I worked on that account, I screwed up. How? A decimal point on the wrong end of a keyword bid. Stupid mistake.
I felt awful. That was real money. It could have been used for better advertising. It could have been used towards team headcount, or product features. Instead I blew it on a bid that was way too high, drawing in a bunch of irrelevant traffic for the keyword (because Google likes to show high bidding ads more often), and the performance was terrible. I called my boss and wrote up a long summary of what happened, why and what the impact was. Let’s just say, it didn’t go down well.
I was no rookie, but it was easy to make the mistake; a typo. If someone like me with all that experience and dedication could fail that hard, it can happen to anybody – and it does happen.
Since that time, I’ve heard more stories of advertisers making bonehead mistakes, and eating humble pie. Like me, they aren’t idiots, they just made a mistake.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that mistakes will stop happening. Instead, we have to put the right foundation in place to minimize the impact of the mistakes.
That is the inspiration behind the MonkeyWorks Monitor.
Monitor your AdWords accounts.
I want to help my fellow marketers to know when something really important in their accounts needs attention. We shouldn’t have to log in and constantly scan the numbers to search for anomalies. And I want to make it easy too, so you don’t have to spend a bunch of time configuring a bunch of alerts just to get a reasonable safety net in place. It takes a minute to set up – we’ve done all the work for you and you also get the benefit of having experience analyst thinking applied to your accounts.
Google will notify you early and often if you aren’t spending at the level they think you could be spending. The MonkeyWorks Monitor will tell you when we think you’re spending too much, or if something looks like it’s broken.
We’ve got your back.