Does anybody use/understand google adwords? I’m thinking of using it to promote my new business. As a tester and to try and understand it before I start using it professionally I’ve put an ad in for something else using £0.01 bids. These are showing on the campaign manager page as ‘below first page bid’ and not showing. Everything is zero (clicks, CTR, costs, etc). Despite that I’ve had 3 completed links from the ad (at least) since setting it up an hour ago which is pretty good going to be honest.

I find there can sometime be a data lag in adwords. Having said that, have you refreshed your page? Have you got the right date set in the top right hand corner? (all mistakes I have made in the past!) If its just a small test, I’d set the budget and time period (think you can do this under campaign settings) and let it run, checking in every so often depending on volume / length of the test / spare time. Careful you don’t constantly tweak your campaign as you won’t know what changes are making a difference – can sometimes take several days for changes to have their full impact. As a very general rule of thumb – optimise, leave it to run, review, re-optimise. Also, you might want to look at the impact of having your ads above the fold on page one – likely to have a significant effect on volume, but costs will also be higher – up to you to make that call!

Good luck – hope it works out for you!

Could be you have it running on the content network as well and clicks are coming from there?