Filed under: General, Pay-per-click by Stuntdubl SEO at 11:55 am, 5/14/2007
If you earned your Google Adwords certification close to when the program was launched, it’s about time to re-take your test, and prove you’re still qualified. If you’re like, me, and don’t do a whole lot of PPC, this could be tough. (I mainly do basic audits as a value add to SEO consulting). I retook the test late last week, and thought I’d put together a quick post on some resources for learning adwords more effectively, and help for taking the test. Many folks will likely be retaking the test soon, since it’s 2 years after the program launched, and it is a requirement to retake the test to maintain your status.
Firstly, you should probably study a little bit. The Adwords learning center is really impressive now. Since I’ve done my fair share of google bashing, I must take this opportunity to say that whoever is in charge of the learning center is doing a kickass job. It’s jampacked with information in both text and multimedia form that is really helpful for improving your adwords skills. There has been a TON of updates in the last few years in terms of functionality, terms of service, and add on tools and services to the adwords program. The learning center really helped me to wrap my mind around some of these that I had ignored when they were launched (hey, they launch something new weekly if not daily - there’s only so much time in a day to check out the new stuff).
Some of the things I learned while studying in the Adwords learning center and taking practice quizes:
- You can use ONE exclamation point in ad text
- You can use superlatives like "best" if they are backed up by a third party
- When you opt-out of the Google search network, your ads still show on Google search results pages, but do not show on Google’s search partners.
- Embedded match allows the ad to appear on all variations of the keyword except for the exact match of the keyword.
- Embedded match utilizes phrase match, exact match, and negative match.
- In order for a site-targeted image ad to appear on a page, its CPM must outrank the eCPM of the top four keyword-targeted text ads
- In Google analytics - Use the Product Merchandising reports to see which keywords resulted in sales of a certain product.
- In Google analytics - Pages with the highest $Index are those pages which were commonly visited prior to high-value conversions during the same visit.
- Tagging your links helps to get information in your reports about your various marketing efforts. Analytics offers 5 campaign tracking variables. The 5 predefined variables which Analytics offers are Campaign, Source, Medium, Term, and Content.
- When editing keywords using the Find and Edit Keywords Tool, the AdWords system considers the edited words as new keywords.
- Site Exclusion is applied at the Campaign level.
- The Keyword Grouper in the Adwords Editor regroups keywords from one ad group into more granular ad groups
Secondly, take all the practice quizzes. The are very useful in gauging the areas you might be weak (I realized there is a lot of cool functionality in G analytics that I hadn’t used at all). Many of the questions are almost identical to these.
Thirdly, when you’re ready to take the test - open a few browser windows. Open your adwords account, the learning center, and a tab or two to do searches. You can find a lot of answers that you may be up in the air on this way. Being able to look stuff up is one of the real benefits of taking a test online. My retention skills aren’t always that great, but my search and find skills rock. There’s also questions about where stuff is in an account that you can double check by opening your account. You can also search for parts of the questions and find them on various google FAQ’s, or look up the respective topic in the learning center which is very well organized.
Fourthly, after studying for a day or two, you should be able to cruise through about 70% of the exam without thinking twice about the questions. However, you need a 75% to pass, so take your time on the rest. In the prometric test, you can mark items for review later. Cruise through the 60 - 70% of the test, and don’t waste time on those you don’t know. Take your best guess, and mark it for later. With this approach, you should be able to get through the entire 111 questions in about 30 - 45 minutes tops. You’ll then have anywhere from 20 - 40 questions to revisit, research, and answer with another 45 minutes or so to finish. Use your time effectively.
You’ll find out your results at the end of the test. I ended up with a 90%, and was pretty happy with that from a couple days of review, and fairly minimal hands on experience.
More resources for learning about effective PPC marketing with Google Adwords:
Do you have any special tidbits you picked up recently on Adwords or PPC in general?
Filed under: Pay-per-click by Stuntdubl SEO at 2:40 pm, 8/17/2006
I stopped by my buddy Brad “Ewhisper” Geddes site today to send him a funny list of dumb PPC ads, and noticed his Top 10 reasons PPC is better than SEO. Of course, I had to add a little one-upsmanship. In reality, both SEO AND PPC are essential to online marketing visibility, and they complement each other nicely, but I gotta have some fun with ol’ Ewhisper, and, like him, I tend to be a little bit biased.
11. It’s funner to buy traffic for cash rather than to lease it.
10. Bandwidth is cheap.
9. Who really wants to measure EVERYTHING when you can use your unagi like Ross?
8. There’s no such thing as SEO Fraud if you get a good consultant.
7. You don’t have to deal with customer service.
6. Even non-targeted traffic can be siphoned off somewhere.
5. SEO’s aren’t quite clever enough to implement “smart pricing”.
4. You’re helping to improve search engine relevancy.
3. Natural search arbitrage is usually deemed spam and Shari Thurow reports it.
2. No bid wars, and crappy sites don’t cost you.
1. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free**?
**Okay, free is a total misnomer, but you get the point - and credit goes to Doug Stotland of MSN Adcenter who I had the pleasure of meeting briefly at SES.
*Disclaimer - I do SOME PPC and it is a great method to drive traffic, but please understand my bias here. I love all kinds of converting traffic, I just like long-hanging fruit. I’m amazed at the developments in PPC in the last year that I haven’t really kept up, and it does truly move as fast, if not faster than SEO with algo changes, etc. There’s some GREAT money to be made in both fields, and if you can master both, you’re going to be in great shape.
Okay, the title is a hoax. You caught me. I’m a liar who likes to tell stories. There is no “magic formula for website success”. There are only best practices. As a search engine marketer (SEO/ SEM..whatever you want to call it), we are really moving towards being project managers (yes, I harp about this all the time). As a project manager, you have to understand how all the tools at your disposal work, and how they could work better. I’m going to tell you exactly what best practices *I* would use as a guide for marketing a retail (or better yet manufacturer) website online.
Assumptions:
- You have a worthwhile product
- You have exceptional profit margins
- You have a well trained, enthusiastic staff that is willing to work and learn
- You have a plan for growth
- You are willing to change when necessary
- You have a qualified web development team
- You have someone who will handle link development and PPC
10 marketing strategies that matter
Months 1 - 3
Month 1 - Planning
Spend the first month planning. Document and consider every angle to your marketplace. Define your unique selling points. Devise ways you can be remarkable by your customers. Brainstorm and write down EVERY idea in your head that is even remotely related to your new online business. Write down keywords. Start organizing your ideas and writing copy for your pages. Delegate responsibilities to your staff. Start dividing up the work.
Compleat guide to SEM I
Compleat guide to SEM II
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Filed under: General, Internet Marketing, Mr. Ploppy, Pay-per-click, Tools by Stuntdubl SEO at 8:09 am, 5/30/2005
Pay-per-click is a fantastic way to drive and test traffic. A good PPC campaign is great for those who truly understand marketing. Do something. Test. If it works. Do more of it. If it doesn’t - do less. Easy right? It boggles my mind when someone tells me they can’t afford PPC . You really can’t afford NOT to do it…you’re competitors are doing it, and they are learning from it. Do a little yourself. Start slow with low volume specific keywords and LEARN from it. Keep reading and figure out how it works before you start big spends or hiring someone else to do it. Arm yourself with an education.
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Yes, I’m a bit late on the commentary on this one, but after seeing it first hand I thought it was still very worthwhile. These studies are pretty cool, and offer insight and validation on working search marketing theories. I think this was my favorite session that I attended from SES in Toronto - the “Understanding and Influencing Searcher Behavior” session by Gord Hotchkiss of Enquiro, Debbie Jaffe a product marketing manager for Google, and Bonny Brown Director of Research with Keynote. It is really fascinating to see empirical evidence of all the claims I constantly make 
While 72% of statistics are made up on the spot, this session had scientific data backing up the statistics from experiments conducted using eyetracking studies and other sophisticated testing methods. Before I get started with the methodolgy and a bunch of resources to read for more information, I’d like to list the takeaways:
-
If you really want visibility in paid search you better get in the top two “golden” spots above organic search (rumor has it they are testing a third listing there)
- If your ranked below #5 your visibility is about half of that of those listed in the top 3 for that phrase
- At least 75% of clickthroughs occur through the organic results
- People lie about not clicking on paid search ads
- People still don’t look at PPC a lot…the top right listing only gets 50% visibility (equivalent to the #5 spot in organic search)
These studies really fascinate me despite mainly validating intuition. The data gathered backs up the rationale for being apart of the SEO industry nicely (it’s fun to compete for prime real estate). It also helps with usability and understanding and catering to the needs of your website visitors. It’s pretty simple to figure out that you should put the most important stuff where users tend to look most. It’s a bit harder to understand just how precious few seconds you have to catch the users attention and captivate them with something important.
From the Enquiro whitepaper:
Organic Ranking Visibility
(shown in a percentage of participants looking at a listing in this location)
Rank 1 - 100%
Rank 2 - 100%
Rank 3 - 100%
Rank 4 - 85%
Rank 5 - 60%
Rank 6 - 50%
Rank 7 - 50%
Rank 8 - 30%
Rank 9 - 30%
Rank 10 - 20%
Side sponsored ad visibility
(shown is percentage of participants looking at an ad in this location)
1 – 50%
2 – 40%
3 – 30%
4 – 20%
5 – 10%
6 – 10%
7 – 10%
8 – 10%
Resources and commentary on Eyetrack studies
It’s interesting to consider how these types of studies effect adsense or other advertising. It is also reinforcement to writing “scan-able” content, and good titles that will get clickthroughs. There were several other fairly inspirational ideas that I derived from this session, but if you look through the studies most of the same headslapping ideas will dawn upon you.
Tags: Eye Tracking, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Paid Search, Search Marketing Research
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, General, Industry Stuff, Pay-per-click by Stuntdubl SEO at 9:08 am, 4/6/2005
Button pusher SEO is usually what the “white hat” mouseketeers like to whine about loudest. The rationale, is that it is that it is really easy to do, and tends to be on the “spammy” side because of things because it is generally somewhat automated. Automated, however, doesn’t always mean easy. Button pushing SEO’s, work very hard to create tools that will create content, links, and ultimately revenue with techniques that push the envelope. They don’t worry about update schedules, they worry about revenue and developing improved tools.
While I am sometimes a bit miffed when I see a button pusher/ brute force SEO’d site beating me in the SERPs, I have to respect the intelligence and creativity it took to create such a site. Several things have contributed to the proliferation of these type of sites including the ability to scrape pages (wikipedia, dmoz, etc.), aggregating dynamic content with RSS, adsense (which easily monetizes any topical content), affiliate programs and more. This rash of adsense scraper sites is contributing to increasing volumes of discussion on the topic.
The question is how long will this information pollution continue? Since Adwords is G’s main source of income, are they in any hurry to stop these sh*tty adsense scraper sites? There are plenty of people willing to continue using “the blend” (which I even remember getting a nice little flip manual guide from G recommending it as one of the ways to increase click through rate) and cashing in nice adsense checks by cranking out mountains of content to further pollute the information superhighway (is it still trendy to call it that?). With the growth of this garbage we may soon be calling it the Newark Net Back Alley. The worst part is I can’t even say that I blame scrapers, in some regards they are doing something similar to Google though on a much smaller scale (and a much poorer job) by taking some information, cacheing it and attempting to organize it, then putting ads up to make money off of it.
As for me, I try to use fairly decent original content, but am still a big fan of “the blend”. Since most folks don’t have a clue between an ad and regular search result, I’m guessing it’s not that big of a deal. The results from Adwords should, in theory, be highly relevant anyhow, as someone wouldn’t be stupid enough to pay for the click if it wasn’t relevant. I’m not overly concerned if the ads clicked on my site only have the visitor stay for 10 seconds. G doesn’t care either. The only person who cares is the person blindly throwing money at PPC. Wise up irrational spenders and either turn off content targeting or start tracking better.
If you’re worried about Google being the only ones polluting the web, don’t be, affiliate programs will most certainly help, and Yahoo will be contributing soon too with their publisher program.
One definite solution in the realm would be source exclusion which Blowsearch has reportedly already implemented. Protecting advertisers is going to be nearly as important in continued growth for G as protecting investors intrests will be. My guess is that the purchase of Urchin should help to aid in combating fraud and other related problems.
Tag: Google Adsense
The rumor that spilled and started yesterday was that MSN will be announcing their new pay per click service very soon. While this is not a big surprise in itself since they have been recruiting for the positions associated with the new service for quite a while, it does bring up some interesting questions.
How will the existing relationship with Overture be handled?
From what I understand, the contract extends to some time in 2006, and I don’t imagine that was a very cheap contract. My guess is that M$ will continue to use Overture inventory until they have built up a strong enough user base to support themselves.
Can I get cheap nickle/dime clicks on incredible keywords?
As mentioned above, it’s pretty doubtful, but the idea of bidding on “search engine optimization consultant” for a dime sure has my motor running. Even if quick-to-adopt internet marketer’s don’t get nickle and dime clicks on highly competitive phrases, there still has to be some “sweet spots” between the cut off point of Overture inventory and Microsoft’s new inventory.
How ’bout some affiliate arbitrage?
With the above mentioned question in mind…can I bid low and sell the traffic high? Time to dig out some of those old affiliate username/ passes.
Will there be coupons at conferences?
MSN…if you’re reading this…you can make up for the shaft that you gave me and others when you turned us away at the door. Learn from G…break out some nice big PPC coupons and be sure to look the other way when we come up to your booth to grab a handful of them.
What will Google do?
This move puts the spotlight on the former media darling in my opinion. With both MSN and Yahoo (with their soon to be announced contextual advertising publishers program) going after G’s cash cows what are they going to come up with to continue their projected growth levels?
What will Yahoo do? (oh right, the contextual advertising thing)?
This has still gotta be a pretty hefty hit to Yahoo revenue when this one slides away. Not real sure what the “experts” say MSN market share is, but I know what it is in my stats, and a lot of times it seems fairly close to the ‘hoo. Since a very substantial portion of revenue/profit comes from paid search ads and Y is losing 20, 30, 40%(?) of their paid search distrubution…well…I think you can do the math.
I think ultimately, the same as a 3rd organic SE, the competition will be positive and will fuel positive growth in the industry. Perhaps, MSN will even take a stronger stance on click fraud and take more responsbility for aiding publishers with monitoring fraud levels. Hopefully we will also see some other nice services and tools evolve out of the competition that will make life as an internet marketing consultant a bit easier.
Discussions:
Discussion at Webmasterworld.com
WMW Supporter’s forum discussion
Post at Threadwatch.org
Tag:MSN PPC
