Look how old this is! I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 12 years 9 months 2 days ago. This industry changes FAST, so blindly following the advice here *may not* be a good idea! If you're at all unsure, feel free to hit me up on Twitter and ask.
It looks like Google Boost has undergone a name change to AdWords Express, but it appears everything else has remained the same. (update 7/26 – Google just announced the change)
This morning while logging in to a client’s Google Places account, instead of seeing “create a Boost ad” or “See my Boost Dashboard” I’m seeing it referred to as Adwords Express.
If you already have a Boost ad campaign, then you’ll see the option for “View AdWords Express Dashboard”.
Once you’re inside that dashboard, everything looks the same, right down to the inability to get much useful information.
If you look inside your Google Adwords stats, you’ll still see all of the integration with your Boost campaign since it’s inception, along with the HIGHLY segmented click data.
The name of the campaigns you’ll see here is not “Google Boost”, (and it never has been) it’s still called “Google Places Ads”.
Just like before, while the name was Boost, we are still not able to edit the campaign or its content in AdWords, or even change the names of the campaigns or ad groups, but I wonder if this ability might not be enabled soon.
Clicking through those campaigns to find the keywords and impression counts can be tedious, so you’re far better off doing a quick report / export, and then filtering through what you get.
For spending under a few hundred dollars a month, I still maintain that using Google Boost “or “Adwords Express” is not all that bad, and it’s a good time saver for small businesses that don’t have the time to dink around with their AdWords accounts forever.
You can get fast and deep keyword additions, fast and the keyword additions, have them segmented into different ad groups, and even export for later importation into a new AdWords campaign.
I’m not so sure Adwords Express is a very good idea for a businessman with no technical knowledge or much knowledge of PPC advertising. When I think of all the money I’ve spent and wasted because I didn’t understand Adwords as well as I thought I did, and then to think about letting Google be in charge of my keyword selection and matching, and bids . . . I don’t know. Not to mention that writing effective PPC ads and headlines isn’t all that easy or intuitive. Sounds like a good deal for Google, and maybe not so good a deal for the advertiser.
To me, those are the same reasons why Adwords Express might be a better option for someone spending just a couple hundred bucks a month.
There’s nothing to learn, very little to think about, just set it and forget it. If you saw the massive infrastructure of ad groups and keywords they build automatically, I think you’d be impressed. Still though, I don’t disagree w/ you that learning the ropes of AdWords, or finding an experienced Adwords agency / person / pro to help would be more beneficial than using AW Express, but only IF you have the budget – Most pros I know don’t want to manage even a $1000 monthly account, much less a $200 one…