Adwords Campaign Watcher can be reached by mail at 2 Chaparral Drive, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 87508, or by phone at 505-660-7072, or by email at admin @ adwordscampaignwatcher.com.

Pam is available to set up and manage AdWords, Yahoo and MSN accounts, to install AdWords conversion tracking, and to run Google Website Optimizer Tests.

About Us - The Longer Version

The AdWords Campaign Watcher is a new tool. It was conceived last year in the late summer when I was getting really, really tired of having to check an AdWords account I was maintaining every 2-3 hours. The account spent $12,000 a day, so staying on top of it was critical. Every 3-4 months, usually at 2am in the morning (when sys admins like to make changes to servers) something somewhere in the hosting or billing or email system would collapse, and even by the time I logged in at 7am, we'd have blown $1-2,000 before anybody could turn anything off.

This happened the one weekend I dared leave an internet connection to take a 2 night "vacation" in the Jemez mountains. Sure enough, when I got back home at 3pm on Sunday - and checked the AdWords account first thing home, of course - we had blown through over $5,000. The merchant account processor had changed an ip address somewhere and not told anyone.

Then I started wondering about how to automate this nonsense.

I backburnered the idea for awhile, because I've never built an online tool on my own (I have done it when I worked at companies with developers, but that was with somebody else's money). But the idea kept coming up, and I kept getting more and more tired of checking the account every 2-3 hours.

So finally, in December, I did a little survey. The survey results came back with a resounding "YES! We want this". I proceeded to get spooked again and did nothing for a few more weeks. Finally, as the frustration with being chained to the account grew, I started looking for developers. I took the smart step of calling Rackspace (who now hosts the AdWords Campaign Watcher) and told them about the project, and said I wanted to host it with them, and that I needed to find a good developer team. They referred me to three different firms, all of which gave me wildly different quotes. I asked again for another group of developers, which I also contacted. All but one of them got back to me. The most affordable place was tempting, but the project manager I spoke with either really didn't like me, really didn't like the job, or was just in a miserable mood the two times I talked with him.

It's tough when you have in front of you the logical choice, but your gut is screaming that these people don't want to do the work, and this is going to be a really bad experience. So I waited. About four days later the one place that hadn't got back to me finally did. They wouldn't do the work, but they knew somebody who could. So I contacted the somebody. They understood what I wanted immediately, had two good confirmable references, and gave me a quote that was a third of what the previously lowest quote was. Boom: 24 hours later the contract was signed and we were under way.

At the end of the first round of development, I turned the traffic on to the site. Somehow, before I had deluded myself into thinking that clicks were going to be 50 cents each. Not so. Try $2+ (note from a week later: have gotten it down below $1 with micro-adgroups & keyword-laden adcopy). After sending a couple hundred clicks to the page with no sales, I realized it wasn't working. So I circled back and got a bunch of quality assurance logos, and asked my developers to give all new users a 14 day free trial. We'll see how it goes.