Option 1 - Start with a full daily budget.
The benefit of this is that I have full stats immediately. That allows me to tweak the campaign on the fly and get better results faster. Obviously that has it's downsides as well. I can spend a lot of money and find out $300 later that my landing page isn't converting well, or I have 10,000 clicks and a .01% CTR. Both would be very bad.
Option 2 - Spend 1/4 daily budget and increase accordingly.
This option keeps my mistakes from becoming extremely expensive. Since I'm not a rich man, money does indeed matter to me. I'm not just doing this for your enjoyment, but also to make some money! However, with this option I won't have daily stats that are actually what I'll be receiving. I won't be able to approximate how much money I'll really need to spend to have my ads shown all day and I won't know my real CPC because my CTR won't be exact.
What I need from you is a recommendation!
Should I choose option 1 or option 2. Give me a vote and a reason behind that vote!
Hi Brandon,
I'm a firm believer that with many things related to Google AdWords, there are no "right ways" of doing things. Just many "wrong ways"!
However in this case, I think that for the majority of people, Option 2 is the way to go. We've seen many reasons why dipping your toes in with caution is more prudent, but the bottom line is that not doing so could prove to be a very costly mistake.
The classic example was a (non software) company that we worked with. One of their apparently legitimate keywords turned out to be the name of a fairly popular band we'd never heard of! They were getting a lot of impressions in a very short time, the vast majority of which appeared to be curious about the ad!
By starting with a low budget (and also very importantly low bids), we had a vaguely amusing experience instead of a disaster...
Posted by: Dave Collins | September 1, 2006 12:29 AM | Permalink to Comment