Well, last week I finally had the time to do it and I passed the Search Advertising Advanced Exam. Now I’m GAP qualified and, whoohoo!, I now have the big G accreditation.

This exam is by far more difficult than the Fundamentals exam, and my advice to anyone who’s going to take it is to study and memorize everything the learning center has to offer. Experience helps a lot, but there are questions about issues you don’t often face in your ongoing work, so STUDY!

- Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

Minding the GAP 2

The GAP is a program designed for professionals managing multiple Adwords accounts, granting them official Google recognition and other benefits that are helpful in this field.

To become a qualified member you have to pass two exams:

The first one is Google Advertising Fundamentals Exam, a two hour long exam that contains 120 questions. This is a new version of the exam, designed to be more rigorous and strategy-oriented and covers all current products and best practices to help run and manage AdWords campaigns.

And the second one is a choice between the Search Advertising Advanced Exam, which is available and other two, which are in production.

Hurray!!

[patting myself on the back]- Today I passed the Google Advertising Fundamentals Exam, with a score of 98% (85% is required to pass)

This puts me half way to being qualified and joining the club!
I will update as soon as I take the second exam in the beginning of March.

- Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

Minding the GAP

Well, you’ll be surprised to hear that many internet marketers really think that that’s where it ends. But, the truth is that there is much more to it.

Makes sense too.

Think about it: how much time do you spend on a search engine result page (SERP)? A couple of seconds till you click through? That’s right…

According to research, only 5% of the surfing time is spent on SERPs. The other 95% is browsing content pages.

Content Network

Google, as well as the other PPC platforms, provides you with a choice.

1. Advertise on their Search Network, and appear on the SERPs.
2. Or, advertise on the content network, and appear on websites (AdSense blocks, in case of Google).

So, it is true that advertising on the Search Network will get you ninja-precision targeting — using the right keyword you literally grab someone with a credit card in his hand and sell him your product.

But, keeping in mind that you get noticed only during those 5% of the time spent on the SERPs, you are missing out on a huge potential if you are not advertising on content.

Let me ask you another one…

What is the first thing you think about when you hear the term Content Network / AdSense Ads?
It’s those sponsored text-ads that appear on many sites all over the web, isn’t it?

Yea, that’s another one. Many marketers, even those that have been around for a while and done some PPC, still think that the Content Network is just about those text ads on websites.

But, did you know that you can place Image Ads and Video Ads too?

That’s really cool when you want to create brand awareness and draw attention during a launch of a product!

So, what’s the secret you ask?

The secret is to be open minded, and to try all of the available tools that are offered to you.

There is a huge potential that is not being used. Take a Content Network campaign for a spin. Test some text-ads. Throw in some image-ads. You’ll be surprised how well it can turn out to work for you…

Don’t take the most popular / the easiest route, or what you’ve read once in an ebook.

- Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

PPC Marketing Secrets 2

Split Testing, A/B Testing or What’s It Called…

Split testing is as important for a PPC marketer as keyword research.

Instead of spending a week waiting for results and then changing something to see if it gets an increase in sales, you make all the possible variations in advance, so by the end of the week you know which combo is performing better, and ditch the losers!

You can split test everything, and you really should. Ad copy, landing page design and affiliate offers those are the things you should start split testing as soon as you launch your campaign.

What are we testing for?

The goal of the split test can vary. Affiliate offers are rather straight forward – you test for which one is converting better.

With ad copy and landing page design you can test for which one converts better into clicks, or you can test which one converts better into sales. In general, you should concentrate on ad CTR, because you want it to be as high as possible for a high quality score, and on LP CTR because you want to drive that traffic to the offers.

Later as you zero in on the best CTR combination, you will move to testing which one sells the most.

LP Playground

Split testing landing pages is fascinating and interesting. You can test different sales copy, different background colors, different images, and every single change would have an influence on the goal! It’s amazing.

As I already said above, it’s a bad idea to start with only one landing page design and scratch your head at the end of the week because you discovered you had only 14% CTR… Having two or more variations would show you the winner straight away.

Don’t stop after you have your winner though. Create more variations to see if they would outperform the winner!

How to…

Ad copy is simple. Create two ads per adgroup and set them to be shown evenly (not optimized). That way at the end of the day / week, whenever you reach enough clicks to be enough to draw statistical conclusions, you see which one is the worst CTR performer and rewrite it to be like the winner, with a change. That way you will end with a high performer ad after a few rounds.

Offers are also simple. If you use Tracking202 or Prosper202, there’s a built in offer rotation functionality. Otherwise, there are a lot of free PHP scripts available that will rotate the affiliate links on you page. After you have enough sales, you check which one converted at the highest rate.

For testing landing pages I use Google’s Website Optimizer. It offers a/b testing and multivariate testing. What you do is create an experiment where you define the two (or more) versions of the page that you want to test and plant a little script on each one. A goal page is required – a page where Google’s script would check for successful conversion. After that Google will show the different variants to your traffic and collect conversion data.

- Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

PPC Marketing Secrets 1

What do they offer to the user? Could be everything!
Free Gift Cards, Free Product Samples, LCD screens, PCs and MACs, etc…

Usually the user would enter his email or zip to be “qualified”, and then proceed to follow other instructions. You, however, get paid immediately after he submits that one field. What he does or does not afterwards is not your concern.

I know many people that don’t even look at those offers because the pay is only between $1 to $2 US. At first glance, nothing to write home about, but it really ads up if you know how to market those suckers.

The best thing about those offers is that for you to get paid, the user doesn’t have to whip out his credit card. Once he submits his email or zip, you get paid. That’s why the conversion rates on those offers are higher than any other. An email or zip submit offer can sometimes convert at 30%.

Almost every CPA network carries those, including Market Leverage, which is great.

What to pay attention to?

Price
Obviously enough, you have to get cheap traffic. Although conversion rates are high, you still can’t afford to buy clicks for $0.5, or even $0.2, and expect to make money with it.
I mean really cheap. $0.01-$0.08, or free…

Targetting
To boost conversions you have to target your campaigns properly. Make a profile of who would be interested in an offer and figure out how to get that specific audience to fill out that zip/email submit.

Yea I know, easier said than done, but with the right tools you can find out how to make the most of your money (Google Insights for Search *wink, wink*)

Preselling
No presell for these… These are simple, matter of fact offers. A presell attempt would only confuse the punter, and make him wonder wtf is going on.

Imagine an ad saying “Get a Free Wii For Participating in a Brief Survey”, then getting to a presell page that basically says the same with some other bs, and only then getting to the offer page, where again they are going to be pitched a Wii for participating.

Maintenance
Always keep an eye on your conversion rates. Some of you may be familiar with scrubbing. Scrubbing is when a merchant decides not to register some of your sales.

This could be for many reasons, which I will not mention here. Maybe in another post

But, this means that at some point you might see a drop in your conversion rates from, say, 20% to 5%. When this happens it is time to look for another offer.

My Pitch

Ha! How can I end this post without pitching you guys something for desert?

One of the techniques taught at PPC-Coach is marketing single field offers and provides very useful and tried methods to get those work for you. These are elemental and once mastered can be expanded to other types of offers as well.

So… grab my $25 rebate and join PPC-Coach!

Enjoy!

- Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

Make Money With Single Field Offers