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

credit: jon_gilbert

Oh the wondrous Nitrous, how happy I am that I chose to pay the additional $50 to have you during my root canal! Man, this was a great experience.

First of all, the laughing gas doesn’t make you laugh at all. What it does is make you very, very optimistic about everything that is going on. I mean, the dentist could drill, cut, inflict pain, whatnot. You just don’t care.

The pain is still there, but you are in this “bring it on” mode. So it is very recommended.

Another perk is that while high on nitrous your mind races, and all sort of ideas pop into your mind. Some are really ridiculous, but some are really great. The tough part is remembering them after it wears off.

I had this cool idea of promoting a CPA offer on Facebook in a certain way, and what do you know… took me a while to remember what on earth was it, but when I did, and implemented it, the results were good. lol… Conversions are ok, and the campaign is profitable.

Can’t tell you what it is though, sorry. Have your own nitrous enlightenment.

What I do want to tell you is the difference between running Facebook ads to Adwords.

While doing Adwords Search you can target the keyword the person is searching for and find those customers that are in the “buy mode” for your specific offer.

On Facebook, however, no one searches anything. But, you can target your adds to many parameters. Geo, Age, interests, language. marital status, etc… So, your mindset should be different.

Pick an offer that you think would fit the tightest targeting, and run it. Best bet if it is a lead, not a sale.

SO, for example, don’t get those forex or bizopp offers. Take a mobile pin offer for a trendy ringtone or a mobile trivia game. Target a certain country (if you know a foreign language and the offer accepts this traffic, great, make it local), think of the most probable age group. Think if that person would be a man or a woman (try running a Quantcast search on the url of the offer to get a whole bunch of stats), set the bid to the recommended lowest bid and go, go, go…

Don’t dismiss Facebook because people say it doesn’t work. Just try.

- Alex

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

Facebook Ads on Nitrous

Even “better” news: currently Google’s on a huge slapping spree on the Content Network.

QS on the content network is getting ever more tighter, and a lot of people that were banking on the content network are forced to rethink their strategies.

What I meant in the title that you may get slapped for something you did in your past. It was supposed to be a fairly short post but it isn’t, so, bear with me, I’ll give some examples first.

What is the Google Slap?

The classic Google Slap, in PPC context, is a result of Google’s algorithm finding your page irrelevant to the keywords you’re buying. As an effect of the slap you may have some or all of your keyword bids raised up to $10 per click, by lowering your keyword Quality Score.

Since Google is a living and constantly changing organism, the slap has also evolved and now takes a few new forms that don’t have anything to do with relevancy.

Example 1: In an effort to improve user experience, Google is intentionally raising bids on keywords, and what’s even worse, artificially limiting traffic. That is a global trend and there’s nothing we can do about it. You might not even feel it, unless you run $100k/month on adwords.

Google hopes that by doing so only very targeted ads leading to laser targeted content will be shown to the user. Bummer for us, hurray for the users.

Example 2: Google doesn’t like (to say the least) certain types of offers. The best example are the infamous Acai Berry offers. But Grant offers are in there too.

While some Acai offers are totally legit, a lot of offers popped up that are plain ol’ scams.

These offers usually offer a free month’s trial for S&H only, $3-$5. Then the happy camper eventually discovers, ofter one month, that he had subscribed to a recurring charge. This is stated in the TOS of the offer, and this is actually a legit model many offers adopt.

The scammy part is that those offers make it nearly impossible to cancel these charges. Same story with Grant offers btw.

So, Google’s slapping the whole vertical. Doesn’t matter if you’re with a legit offer or with the scam offer. You will get slapped.

Example 3: Google doesn’t like data collection sites, as they don’t provide value to the user. If you’re running zip or email submit offers you will get slapped. It may take a day or it may take a month, depending on bot activity, but you will. Nothing helps.

That’s what I meant by Something From Your Past:

Example 4: Recently many affiliate marketers, on PPC-Coach and elsewhere, complained about experiencing a considerable decrease in Adwords traffic (on the content network) for no apparent reason.

After a while, I’ve seen reports of it happening on accounts that were, at some point in the past, running the scam offers (see example 2). It doesn’t matter if you repented and now run legit offers only. If your account had bad history with scam offers you’re going down.

Yours truly is one of them. I was toying with those offers when I was starting out a few months ago (not actually understanding what the fuss is about, so I’m innocent, lol). But I’ve had a drop in traffic from the content network during the last couple of weeks and it appears that the word is true.

To prove that I started a new account and moved all my legit campaigns over there. Traffic is now restored to previous levels.

So there you have it. Don’t mess with Google

- Alex

P.S.
Remember my last post about reasons to use proxies? The Easy Google Profit offer in this post is restricted to US traffic… A live example.

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

The Google Slap, Might Be Something From The Past

So, yesterday was bad. Minimal impressions in Adwords and only two sales early in the morning. That’s it.

Nothing happened during all yesterday. Could you believe that? I was amazed.
Me ego was smudged in dirt, but what can you do but to dust yourself off and move on? So I did.

But then, after building a different campaign, I thought to myself: What if I raised the bids a bit? Maybe someone is bullying me?

Of course, in order to bully me to such extent for me to have zero traffic, someone should have known the whole keyword list I was using, which is almost impossible. Nevertheless, the morning after, I raised my bids and voila – impressions were mounting and clicks were abundant!!

So, what’s going on here? I simply don’t know.

My experience is to little to have anything to say to that. Chances of someone bullying my whole campaign are similar to chances of being struck by lightning.

So what do I have to say about today’s traffic?

Although it had a great CTR, and clicks were many, the conversion rate was smaller than the day before yesterday.

First of all, I didn’t have a chance to optimize my campaign because of being smudged in dirt. And there’s a lesson to learn here – when they do that to you, don’t cooperate. Instead of that I should have sat down and thoroughly looked through the data to find duds and misfires.

In addition, today is Christmas!!! Happy time, right? Not if you’re trying to earn money as an affiliate marketer.

Basically they say that November-December is the worst time of the year for affiliate marketing. But the day before Christmas, Christmas eve, the day after… you’d be better off eating that turkey, or whatever.

So I hope that in a day or two, after a sift through the campaign and people feel the urge to buy again, my story would turn the right way.

- Alex

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

A Quick Update and Merry Christmas to Everyone

Instantly, to go with the fever, I contracted another dangerous thingie: the Chronic Refresh Syndrome (CRS). I began refreshing my stats every minute to check whether a new sale was made. Of course, just as when watching a pot boil, sales weren’t happening.

It’s when I took a nap and woke up I found out that another 3 sales were winking at me. To make the story short, when I went to sleep for the night I had 10 sales, and then in the morning there were another 10!

Naturally my sleep was troubled that night. Visions of mountains of cash and FedEx people delivering my cheques were bothering me all night. Those additional 10 sales were a little disappointing considering my last dream before waking up was checking the stats and seeing 109 sales…

The Bad News

I don’t know why but the PR of this blog was slapped down to 0. WTF?
What could I have possibly done to piss Google off?

Anyway, I don’t really care. I don’t make money with this blog anyway.

The Really Bad News

Only 2 sales today. Traffic is 10% of what it was yesterday. I’m currently using only Adwords, which is Google. Are they zeroing in on me, and shutting my internet ventures down?

Well, I do care about this, so I’m going to look into it somehow.

So, this was a quick update. If you have any questions – shoot. In the comments, please.

- Alex

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

Made My First PPC Sale Yesterday!

Today I want to share one of the best examples of thinking outside the box I’ve ever seen.

Who doesn’t love a pizza once in a while?

You eat it slice by slice…

You happily reach the end, when.. Oh Boy!! WTF?!

But, when the initial shock dissipates,

…it appears to be a advertisement for a local exterminator.

[I'm giving you a minute to soak that in... Please feel free to run through the sequence again]

Now, I know it doesn’t come through as very appropriate, especially keeping in mind that the pizza-eating experience has been ruined. But, please admit it.
It’s genius.

• Think about what would pop into his mind when he will have an insect problem?
• Think about the number of stories that would be told by that “unfortunate” customer to his friends and relatives.

Use this as an inspiration for your own marketing efforts.
Consider everything, dismiss nothing.

- Alex

Technorati Tags: adwords, advertisement, internet marketing, marketing, outside the box, pizza

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

Best Example of Thinking Outside the Box