Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

While searching the web for new, relevant information on paid search and PPC Management – I stumble across quite a few forums with people posting complaints and pleas for help regarding Google AdWords Account limits.  Whether you are an AdWords Editor novice or a pro, at some point you have probably gotten an error while trying to post your campaigns.  Usually there is not much explanation to the error, except something like this:

“AdWords Editor is unable to check or post some of your changes, because doing so would cause you to  exceed AdWords account limits. In order to complete your request, please revert some of your  unposted changes or delete some items, then retry your request. For more information about AdWords account limits, please contact AdWords Support. (Error number: 17)”

Typically this error only appears after working long and hard in your account adding new keywords, ad groups and ads, so seeing it is especially frustrating.  If you have received this error, check your campaigns, ad groups, keywords and ads to make sure you are within the Google AdWords Account limits:

Standard AdWords Account

* 25 campaigns
* 2,000 ad groups per campaign
* 2,000 keywords per ad group
* 50 ads per ad group (any format)
* Approximately 50,000 total keywords per account

If you find that you need more space in your account and you anticipate exceeding the Standard AdWords Account size limits, you can e-mail AdWords support and request your account be expanded:

Expanded AdWords Account

* 100 campaigns
* 10,000 ad groups per campaign
* 5,000 keywords per ad group
* 50 ads per ad group (any format)
* Approximately 100,000 keywords per account

Hopefully this information will help the next time you run into the dreaded AdWords Editor “Error number: 17”

Google AdWords provides a lot of data regarding your campaign performance.  And if you have Google Analytics installed (which you should – it’s free and easy), you have access to a lot of useful data there as well.  

It can actually be overwhelming when you first start to poke around your PPC advertising campaign or your Google Analytics account to figure out what the most valuable data really is, so let me point you in a couple key places.

The new interface has some really great ways to view, filter and analyze your Google AdWords campaign data quickly and efficiently.  These options used to only be available in the reports area, but now they can be seen for every campaign and ad group.

With the new Google AdWords interface, you now have a great new data reporting tool on the right hand side.  It is a graph that will show you the trend for the time period you have selected on several different data values.  You can change the date range to view as many days as you like – I prefer either 30 or 7 depending on the campaign.  The two data items I keep an eye on from this “30 thousand foot” view are Impressions and Cost.  Basically we are looking for any trends – up or down – of the number of impressions your ads are getting and the amount that is being spent on the entire account.  If either one has an unusual spike, there is going to be some digging to do to be sure everything is running as planned.

Also, while you are getting that overview perspective for your AdWords account, go ahead and sort campaigns and ad groups by Cost (descending). This way, your attention is focused on the highest spenders at a high level.  This will also alert you to situations where your highest spenders shouldn’t be your highest spenders and you can make changes accordingly. If you have PPC advertising questions, you might want to consider contacting a professional PPC management company with questions or to plan a consultation.