Official News–

I would like to see an official news feature in the adwords admin that keeps me up to date with all the feature releases and betas. I don’t want to scour the internet for adwords updates. Just tell me when there is something I need to know…or may want to know. Put it in the notifications.

I Hate The Notifications.

(Note the scroll bar).

Our bosses read these. They don’t know what they mean. When you send us a red highlighted error message that states that one of my 10k ads had an error my boss might think that is an actual problem that needs immediate attention. It doesn’t. You know it.  Especially since I am testing 5 other ads for the same keywords. AND most of the campaigns are paused. Why do you do this to me? I have dealt with this issue with every boss and every client so I know this is not an issue of my bosses simply being crazy. Well…regardless…it still needs to be addressed.

Other red error messages that are worthless: “Your campaign has ended”…no kidding, I wanted it to end. I don’t mind a reminder but come on.

“Your campaign can use campaign optimizer”…yeah, I know that too. I don’t want to use it. Is that an urgent message?

“Keyword conflicts”…thank you…this is an important one.

The lightbulb sign on every campaign that tells me how to improve my campaign is annoying. I realize that if I “add broad keywords” “raise the bid to the first page” and “add more keywords” my campaign may “improve”. Ill also be spending more money…that’s not mentioned. Almost every campaign has a lightbulb…it makes it look like I am not doing my job. Trust me- you want to please me just as much as the executives or I will stop singing your praises and start spending my money elsewhere.

Think of all the time I have to spend re-educating my bosses every month. I could be spending that time optimizing my campaigns. And when my campaigns do better, we’ll probably spend more money. Help me help you.

The Adwords Editor Needs To Report ROI

The editor shows all sorts of information, but why not revenue and ROI? I won’t spend much time on this because there must be some bizarre technical reason this isn’t being done. It would be very valuable to have this info. Please make it happen.

Adult Content and Ads

Currently the Adwords team reviews ads to see if they are family material. If they are not, they restrict the content to show only to adult audiences. For example, if I use the word “sexy” in an ad it is likely to get marked as adult. But not always. When something gets marked adult it limits the audience. Impressions go down and my reach is significantly lower. Sometimes I actually DO WANT my ad to be marked as adult. If I am selling something for an audience of 18+ year olds, sometimes I do not want kids to see my ads. Otherwise my CPA goes crazy and I can’t afford to bid on these keywords.

Currently there is no way to mark an ad as adult by myself. I have to try to get you (Google) to flag it. It is very inefficient trying to guess what will get pass your automatic filters so that your human screeners can mark this as adult. Here is an example of me trying to get something flagged as adult, but I got flagged before it got to the human screeners:

Oops.

See my problem? I am selling bikinis for women and I don’t want people who are looking for bikinis for kids using a keyword like “bikinis” to see my ad. A great solution would be to allow me to check a box to only show a particular ad to an adult audience. Does that make sense? I have tried to explain it to three people on your team but they didn’t seem to get it.

And yes, I would consider employment as a product manager for adwords.