“More customers with easy advertising! Set up your online ad in 15 minutes and let Google do the rest.” That’s the introduction said by Google, this sentence makes lots of small business owners start to use Google Ads Express, one sentence makes many small and medium businesses fall into the abyss of Google Ads Express.

Yes, buying digital media ads is that simple, simple as buying newspaper advertisements. Is this really the case? 

No. First of all, Adwords Express isn’t a new feature. It appeared as early as 2011, and the most recent update was November 2017.

In accordance with the usual practice, following the principle of “Non-virtual-US” and “not hidden evil”, let’s talk about the pros of Adwords Express first.

PROS

   1. Simple Registration and Set-Up Process

This can be seen from the advertising slogan, minimal time commitment and create an ad in minutes. Google made its own complicated initial setup simple, only 4 steps, 15 minutes, your ads will be done. You don’t need to organize keywords like other search ads, you don’t need to manage your bidding, you don’t need Excel skills. Google will automatically advise you the budget and bid directly, all you have to do is enter a credit card and start spending money.

    2. Highly Automated

After you entered your business address, Google will automatically follow your surrounding area for ads positioning so you don’t need to worry about the location to target. No worries about the simple and complicated parameters regarding your ads.

Similarly, you don’t need to worry about how to adjust your bid either. As long as Google thinks increasing the bid will help your ads performance, it will raise the bid for you. The whole advertising process is as easy as driving your car in a self-driving mode.

But don’t forget, no matter how famous Google is, it is always a “business organization”. It’s not a non-profit organization. Google as a technology company with more than 90% of its revenue from advertising, it can and will spend all your settled advertising budget easily.

CONS

    1. Incorrect Audience and Targeting

Google Adwords Express can’t really target your potential customers, Google Ads keywords are divided into the broad match, phrase match and exact match. But you have no choice in Adwords Express, it only provides you with broad matches and doesn’t have negative keywords at all. This will give Google more space and a chance to test their ads data to expand their database. They can display your ads wherever they want.

There has been an example of such a client we have, they run a musical instrument store, but they are always inexplicably contacted by customers looking for fishing gear. So after we know that he is a user of Google Adwords Express, we discovered this fact: Google showed one of its product catalogs, the English name “bass” of bass guitar, to searchers of bass fishing gear. There are many cases like this client, such as those that confuse tire replacement (service) with buying tires (retail), heating and cooling and air purification, traveling to Vancouver (buying travel products) and self-driving tours in Vancouver (search for information), etc.

   2.Wasting Your Advertising Budget

Your budget will be wasted and will increase. Using the same example,  a searcher looking for bass fishing gear found a musical instrument store, they mistakenly clicked on the advertisement and called the musical instrument store and find out they call the wrong store. But because of the large number of advertising interactions, Google will mistakenly think the advertising strategy worked well, the advertiser received more clicks but also cost them more money. 

As a result, unconsciously increased the bid, and Google gives out a new suggestion: Raise your budget to X dollar, and get 15% more clicks! Of course, Google will also propose such an approach in standard Google Ads. However, due to strict configuration and regulations with advertising companies, Google is not allowed to make such “optimization” without authorization.

   3. Limited Creatives & Lower Performance

You will lose out to competitors who use standard Google Ads, with Adwords Express you can’t create richer content.

Google clearly knows that the higher rank you are, the more clicks you get. So they will put the user’s favorite interactive ads to the front while maximizing Google’s own revenue. 

After all, Google is looking at total benefits and not your bid price. But you have to know that there are only 4 ad slots at the top of the Google homepage, do you have only 3 competitors? You are spending money, are you willing to be placed by Google at the bottom of the page, or even the leftovers of the second and third pages?

   4. Poor Customer Support

Google promises: “For customers committing to $10 per day or more in ad budget. Phone support operating hours are Mon-Fri, 9am – 9pm ET.” Isn’t it tempting? 

Although Adwords Express is extremely simple, you can still enjoy up to 12 hours of manual customer service per day. But what you don’t know is these Experts may not understand how Google ads work as you think, and every call will bring you some mechanized suggestions and long hold time, these suggestions are often far inferior to the answers you get under Google searches. 

If you are sensitive industries such as medical care, or advertising disapprove issues,  then you can try how many calls you have to make to solve the issue and see how many answers you can get, and even sometimes they are not capable to help you solve the problem.

Local Google expert? nonexistent. How expensive is the labor in North America? If you want to contact experts directly, your advertising quota must first meet the standard and become a “large customer” of Google or find another way to find an advertising company to help you connect.

But not necessary, because Google Adwords Express itself will not let you know you have the problem, all you can see is your ad spend. 🙂