I’ve been playing with Google’s Adwords just to see how it works with a couple of experimental web sites I’ve been playing around with.

When you sign up and write your ad it does a great job of suggesting keywords, and hundreds of them. You get to choose how much you want to pay per click and what your maximum daily budget is. Also you setup how to pay these daily charges. One of the options was to pay with a credit card. Trouble with that is there is no way of stopping payment if for some reason you aren’t able to stop the ad campaign, so Google would just keep debiting away. I, instead, decided to pay by direct debit, where I do have control and can cancel it whenever I wish. Anyway, back to setting up the budget. If I was willing to pay 10c per click and my daily budget was $1 then once 10 people had clicked the advert then that’s it for the day and the ad shouldn’t appear again for that day.

One of the ad’s I set to 50c per click with a maximum daily budget of $25. Obviously you have to keep a check on this or you could get charged $25 every day though in that case you would have received 50 clicks. There is the option to pause a campaign or even delete it. I was a bit surprised to see an email from Google, soon after setting up the 50c ppc/$25 a day budget, that they were debiting me $25 for the first day’s campaign. That would have been OK if I’d had 50 clicks (50 clicks @ 50c = $25) but I’d only had 3 clicks (What kinda cruddy web site is this? Ed). I thought that was my budget? Nope, sounds more like Google’s budget. That’s what they are gonna charge you whether your ad is displayed and you get clicks or not.

I don’t find Google’s Accounts software very easy to use, it just never seems straightforward and clear. And there’s always some kind of hint or message being displayed that if you do something wrong you’ll have your web site or account banned for life. Sounds like someone’s abusing their position to me. At the end of the email theer was the usual scary message about all the penalties I will incur if I don’t do things the right way according to the Google view of the world. One of them was that if I cancelled the direct debit the account would be automatically deactivated, and no doubt the web site would be deindexed pretty soon after.

Creepy.