Do my AdWords ads only run in the mornings on Google?

This is a common point of confusion with AdWords, actually, because your daily budget starts at one minute after midnight, not 9am or whenever else you'd like to have it begin. Well, to be fair, there's some debate about this, but most of the people I've talked with believe that your spend is used up earlier in the day, which is why early morning adverts are different to late night advertisements on AdWords.

For example, let's say you've allocated $30 per day for your AdWords budget and on that particular day there will be $200 in click revenue generated. Clearly you aren't going to show up for all of that activity: in fact, once your $30 is spent, your advert vanishes from the pool of available advertisements.

If you have a productive, well-designed campaign that's giving you good return on your AdWords investment (a critical measure to track: how much are you paying for your customer acquisition and what percentage of them actually translate into buyers?) I suggest that you increase your daily spend and enjoy the benefits of online success.

As my friend and AdWords guru Dan Murray explains: "Experienced Adwords users who are getting good ROI and have sufficient cash flow set their budget at many *times* the daily recommended spend (as shown in Adwords --> campaign level, "Edit Campaign Settings," "View Recommended Budget") so they don't miss out on any profitable clicks."

I couldn't agree more.

Oh, and, of course, there might be a different reason why your ad isn['t showing up too. Check the "Ads Diagnostic Tool" to find out what's going on with your ads. Probably it's a daily budget issue, but perhaps there's something else going on?

In any case, let me just end by again emphasizing the critical importance of knowing what percentage of visitors from your AdWords campaign turn into buying customers. Without that you can't figure out your return on investment and cannot intelligently set a max bid price on your ads.

Let me give you a quick example: let's say that you're paying $0.75/click on AdWords and that when you do the analysis, it turns out that 10% of those visitors turn into customers who buy your widget. That widget has a $5 profit per sale for you. Is your campaign profitable, or not?

Well, you're paying $7.50 for each customer and making $5.00 profit on them. Sounds to me like you're *losing* $2.50 for each widget you sell. Not good.

How do you adjust that? Well, I'd lower my bid: if you could get a 10% conversion on slightly lower traffic at $.40/click then you would actually have a $1.00/widget profit.

This is simplistic, but it's really important that you understand the value of your advertising campaign and budget appropriately. Don't be suckered into bidding for the #1 spot in AdWords because that's almost NEVER the best place to be.