Cons:  what people said they were most frustrated with about AdWords

1. The learning curve - it's hard to learn, hard to understand, a lot of work to get through the "experimentation phase"
2. "It's set up for techies, by techies." 
   
3. There's often not immediate, significant results (especially for local advertisers).  "21 clicks to the site after the ad was seen by 80,000 people?" 
4. High "bounce rate" for people who click into an ad and bounce right off the site.
5. Click fraud and "thumb slips" by users of mobile phones who click on ads by mistake.
6. Lack of people on the phone to help answer questions at Google. 
7. Lack of transparency about pricing and the Google auction system for bidding since you can't see what others are bidding.
8. Big companies are driving up the prices as they shift more money to search advertising
9. You can spend/waste a lot of money if you don't set up the controls properly.
10. It requires an ongoing investment in time to manage a successful AdWords or PPC advertising campaign.  Prices are always changing, keyword research continues to need to be done, back-end web analytics work needs to be done constantly to learn what's working and what's not for conversion.

 

Lots of cons shared about AdWords.  For the rest of the story - typical response rates and what business owners shared about their experiences and frustrations with Google AdWords, as well as their suggestions for how they're making it work better for them.