Are the questions in the Google AdWords Professional exam suitable for the UK market?

I’ve just passed my re-accreditation as a Google AdWords Accredited Professional (GAP) with a robust score of 89.5%.

I know it sounds petty, but as I was answering my 110 questions in 90 minutes, I was getting more and more annoyed with the references to selling houses in San Francisco, allusions to zip codes and area codes, and prices in dollars and cents.  Just as ex-smokers are the most intolerant, my  shiny new UK citizenship leads me to object to the American bias, Obama’s Nobel prize not withstanding.

Be sure to scroll to the bottom of this message where you can see a specific example where the AdWords Anglo/American relations went well and truly off the rails.

However, let’s start with particular  AdWords issues of significant importance to businesses in the UK that are not addressed in the UK exam.

Here’s a few I would suggest, and I welcome your proposals for additional exam questions;  put them in the comments below and we’ll get them over to the AdWords team.

1.   How is VAT charged on UK AdWords Accounts?

Be careful you are not being charged VAT at the Irish rate of 21%

2.  How effective is the use of Geo-targeting in the UK in light of the way IP addresses are handled by UK Internet Service providers?

Not very accurate for small businesses in the UK.

3.  How effective is mobile Geo-targeting?

Not very precise at this stage

4.  What is a Google AdWords reseller, and who are they in the UK?

There are 5 authorised UK resellers at the moment, and 1 in Ireland.

5.  What impact does “enhanced broad match” have on your ads displaying?

You ads may be displaying when you don’t want them to.

Along the same lines, are the exam questions tailored for British professionals?

I have taken the liberty of copying one of the questions from the Google AdWords exam. It asks “what is the typical spending level of advertisers paying in Pounds Sterling who qualify for the invoicing payment option?” The multiple choice answers, inexplicably, are offered in dollars.

So the first step is to convert the correct answer, £1500 per month, into US dollars.  Hmm, quick calculation… 1.6 dollars to the pound, that’s rougly $1000.  Oops, no it’s not, it’s the other way around.  I always do that.  £1500 pounds is about US$2400.

Oh dear, I’m given the choice of either US$500 or US$4000.  Which would you go for?

I did double check on the Invoicing section on the AdWords help and the answer is right there for us to see:

So, as you are looking for a company to handle your Adwords account, do make sure they are Google AdWords accredited, and that they can demonstrate their entry on the Google Advertising Professionals website.

And then double check that they are able to answer the extra questions that means they understand the UK market!

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Google has created an “Agency Toolkit” – a single point of acccess to free Google tools that can be used to Plan, Create, Place and Measure your online marketing activities.

Designed for Marketing Agencies, I think this is potentially more valuable resource for small businesses managing their own Internet Marketing campaigns.

Google Agency Tookit

SpyFu is a keyword research tool that let’s you discover your competitors’ keyword strategies for their pay per click advertising and organic search engine optimisation.

Larger organisations are using services like Experian’s Hitwise competitive intelligence tool, but at just £14.95 for a 3 day subscription, SypFu is  well suited for small businesses looking to sharpen up their search marketing activities.

The free version provides you with a websites top organic and paid key phrases.  In this example I’m researching the organic and paid key phrases being targeted by a local Nottingham web designer.

This data gives not only a better understanding of key phrases, but also provides competive information on your competitors’ product offerings, target markets, and how they are positioning themselves in the market place:

You can research by your competitor’s domain name, by selected key phrases, or by industry sectors.

With the paid-for version, I can then see a comprehensive list of phrases that I can download to a spreadsheet including  Ad copy, landing page URLs and bid estimates.

You can also see changes in key phrases usage, changes in budgets.  You can get a glimpse of what is working well for your competitors, and what they have decided is not working well:

I decided to test the accuracy of SpyFu to “spy” on some of my own client’s Pay Per Click Advertising.  On the one hand, some of the data is highly revealing, but there was alot of inaccuracies in the results SpyFu reported.  In some examples the budgets were widely inaccurate, and the price per click not representative.

This is because of the way SpyFu gathers competitor data, and the way it then calculates some of the results.

Nevertheless, the information it provides is very useful, and I would suggest using Spyfu to:

• get an overview of the phrases your  competitors are bidding for
• identify new competitors who are bidding in your market space
• discover the organic keywords driving traffic to your competitors’ websites.
• Download this data to a spreadsheet and use it in your own PPC strategy, or to guide your own SEO
• analyse the overlap in PPC advertising key phrases between your own and your competitor’s campaigns
• see all the copy of the adverts a competitior is running, including their landing page addresses

Don’t get ripped off by the BT Web Clicks service.  Why pay £460 every month for a year for a service that would only cost you £150?

More importantly, why is BT claiming to generate “contacts” for your business, when indeed all it is doing is charging you for a “click” to your website .  Since when is a click the same thing as a valuable contact?

BT are aggressively marketing their own Pay Per Click management service branded BT Web Clicks. Delegates at a number of workshops I recently taught have mentioned there is a carpet bombing telemarketing campaign promoting their money back guarantee.  As soon as I see money back promises, I reckon it is worth looking more closely at the detail of what is being promised.

BT Web Clicks guarantees a “level of contacts” – and they price the offer at a sensible £40 per month (+VAT)  giving a business 40 contacts, or £60 gets you 60 contacts, and so forth.

BT will  promote your site, thus generating contacts, via

• BT’s own BT directory sites like BTExchanges.com
• Proprietary directory like Ufindus
• Pay Per Click services on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

So, why are BT being so generous with this offer, and why am I recommending my clients to avoid committing to the BT Web Clicks?

Who Uses BT Exchanges.com?

Have you even heard of BT Exchanges? It’s a big secret to me, and it looks like not many other people are using it.  Take a look at the visitor data for BT Exchanges.  No data means insufficient visitors to register on Google’s radar.

What about the other directories BT are promoting in?

Taking a look at visitor traffic to Ufindus, SmileLocal, and MoreUK.  There is a distinct downward trends as fewer Internet users make use of these directories, dipping towards half the amount of traffic they formerly received:

So, how will BT get all these “contacts” for you?

The answer is likely to be Pay Per Click advertising.

Indeed, in it’s own terms and conditions BT describes the service thus:

“BT Web Clicks is a package of online advertising, enabling business to advertise on Internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo.”

And herein lies the rub.

Let’s do the maths together, and you’ll see why I recommend you avoid BT Web Clicks

A BT Web Click contact is defined as  “calls, clicks, texts, emails.”  Note how BT have cannily included “clicks” as a successful contact. I would hardly equate a Click on my website as a Contact, but that is the marketing spin being put on this package.

I suspect people think a “contact” equates with an enquiry, but  given the low volume of traffic to the directories they are promoting your business in, I think it is fair to assume BT will be getting a delivering the bulk of business contacts as paid “clicks” to your website.

So, at a budget of £40 for 40 contacts, that means you will paying a  £1 per click on the pay per click network for a click that might actually be costing BT 2 pence.  My maths aren’t great, but I think that means for every click there is 98% profit for BT.

But the price of a pound per client is only for the easiest clicks to acquire.  If you are in a more competitive field like Teleconferencing, then BT will charge you £400 per 40 visitors, or whopping £10 per click.

If we take a look at the estimated price per click for teleconferencing using Google AdWords, the price is estimated at £3.75.  That means a business might pay BT £400 per month for a service that costs BT only £150. You do the maths on the profit BT is making.  By the way, the £400 is plus VAT, and the £150 includes VAT

Why is is BT Web Clicks a Bad Idea?

• You are paying a huge mark up on Pay Per Click advertising that you could do yourself, or get a professional agency to do for your more cheaply
• In addition to this cost, you will also be paying a significant set up fee running to hundreds of pounds.
• You are restricted in terms of the flexibility of testing new keywords, and changing your keyword strategies
• You are locked into a 12 month contract.  Even if you’re not happy with the service you have signed on the dotted line and you must continue to pay up
• It is not compatible with a business doing their own PPC advertising.  Either you use BT’s service, or nothing at all.

I hate to even link to the service, but here is where you can learn more about the BT Web Clicks service

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Efficient Frontier have published its Q1 2009 UK Search Engine Performance report based on a sample of UK search engine advertisers and there are a number of very interesting take away messages:

Search marketing advertising spend in the UK dropped 6% in Q1, year on year.

Advertisers’ Cost Per Click (CPC) is falling steadily, with average price falling from 44 pence in Q1 2008 to 30 pence in the same period 2009.

The volume of advertising impressions is on the rise as more consumers are using the Internet, and as the networks have lowered their minimum bid price bringing formerly inactive keywords into play.

As a result of the higher number of impressions, advertisers’ click through rates (CTR) have declined. By way of example, Google AdWords typical CTR dropped from 2.94% in Q1 2008, down to 2.06% in the same period in 2009

These results are based on a sample of advertisers in the financial services, travel, entertainment, retail and telco sectors.

You can read the full report here (PDF).

Google has produced a very useful video discussing exactly how the AdWords auction process works.

Hal Varian, AdWords Chief Economist, is like your favourite uncle sitting down and calmly explaining why there really is no need to be worried about AdWords, and this is exactly how it works.

Designed for folk who might be new to Pay Per Click, I reckon even experienced PPC marketers should settle down and relax for the 9 minutes and 12 seconds it takes to Hal to explain how ads are ranked, how prices are calculated, and how your bid price and Quality Score influence how much you pay per click.

Learn more at the Google AdWords blog

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I’ve just noticed that Google AdWords is displaying advertisers’ favicons alongside the destination URL in the Google search results.

Here’s what I’m seeing:

Taking a look at the source of the favicon images being dispalyed in the search results, they are .png files that are being stored at:

http://www.gstatic.com/ads/images/favicons/

At this stage, not all ads have a favicon displaying.  Travelodge gets it’s favicon displayed, but Lastminute.com doesn’t.

It’s not a question of whether the site has a favicon.ico installed, because these images are .pngs coming from Google’s own archive.

I can’t quite make sense of it yet, but not doubt all will be revealed in due course!

Some more examples:

Update:  they appear to be off again?

My top 5 Internet Marketing tips for fighting the credit crunch.

The economy may be turning ugly, but the Internet offers small businesses opportunities to survive, and even thrive, during this recession we are all calling the credit crunch.

Businesses are looking more carefully at budgets, making sure we can squeeze every penny of profit out of our investments, and looking for the most cost effective ways of delivering our products and services.

And our customers are doing the same:  but they are still spending money.  They may be spending less, but we need to figure out what they’re spending their money on.  And they don’t want to risk wasting a penny.  They want to buy the right products, from companies they can trust.

And our customers’ use of the Internet will continue to grow – after all, it is free.

Marketing budgets may appear to be a soft target for businesses looking to make budget cuts.

But canny business owners will be taking advantage of the opportunities the Internet has to offer.

Here are my top 5 top Internet marketing tips for fight the credit crunch:

1.  Work Smart to Retain your Existing Customer Base

Out of sight means out of mind.  You need to keep in touch with your customers or you risk losing them.  And it is always cheaper to retain an existing customer than acquire a new one.

• Email marketing is the cheapest, easiest, and most effective way keeping in touch with your customers.  I’m not talking spam, and I’m not talking about marketing to get new customers.  You need to be sending out personalised, targeted messages to existing customers who want to hear your news.  And well crafted email messages make sales.

• Blogs are another free and easy way to publish information anbd keep in touch with your clients.  I am of the personal opinion that the majority of the UK population doesn’t know what to do with an RSS feed, but they sure know how to read blogs.

• Getting Social means engaging in conversations with your customers.  Qype, Facebook, Twitter:  these are places where you customers are reviewing your products, discussing their purchasing decisions, exchanging views on your business.  Use these tools to listen to your customers, hear what they’re talking about, learn more about your market.  And remember it isn’t about advertising, your contributions ot the conversation need to be valuable and appropriate

2.  Get Even More Visible in Front of Your Potential Clients

You have to get visitors to your website to make the sales.  And one of the best times to get found by potential clients is when they’re searching for what you’re selling.  You need to get found on the Internet, which means Google, but also means a range of other places on the Internet that your customers visit.

Spending on online marketing is continuing to grow, competition is getting more intense, and as a result it is becoming more expensive.

Now is the time to review which of the visibility tools are going to give you the best return on your investment.  Put together your plan of action for building your visibility on the Internet.

Your Tools Checklist:

• Search engine optimisation, pay per click advertising, banner advertising, classified advertising, online press releases, affiliate marketing, videos, sponsorship programmes

3.  Make Your Business Transparently Trustworthy

You an do all the advertising you want, but consumers trust each other more than they trust your carefully crafted marketing messages.  I have previously written about the importance of customer reviews in building trust.

If you’re selling business to business, then recommendations from colleagues, friends, accountants, and business advisers all have the greatest impact on building trust.

• Case studies and positive stories about your business form an essential part of the content on your website

• Plain speaking in the words you write may look easy, but it takes time and effort to write well.  Make your web copy and email messages sound genuine, and not hollow marketing drivel.

• Cultivate customer reviews.   Sites like Google Local Business Centre, TouchLocal and Qype are platforms for customer reviews and ratings.  I know businesses are scared of negative reviews, but remember even bad reviews contribute to the sense of honesty and trustworthiness.  Keep an eye on your reviews, and listen to what your customers have to say.

4. Measure, Measure, Measure

If you don’t measure, then you can’t manage.  And if you’re not managing, then you could be pouring money down the drain.

Measuring means accountability for your marketing spend.  You need to be measuring against your success criteria.  You may want to measure sales, or email enquiries, or phone calls, or visits to your website.

• You may be using low-tech ways of measuring, like a clipboard near the telephone, and making a tick every time a person says they found you on Google.

• You might be using a dedicated telephone number that is associated with your Internet marketing activities, and when that phone rings you know the web is working for you.

• Or you might be using a web statistics package like Google Analytics, and set up your Goals and Conversion Tracking to see who well your website is performing.

If marketing budgets are tight, then knowing what works makes it easier to make the decisions of where to invest your cash.

5. Test, Learn, Test

And finally, there is no one size fits all answer to the Internet marketing puzzle.

You need to try something new, experiment with a technology or technique you haven’t used before.  Measure your success, and learn from the experiment.

• Experiments should be quick, cheap, and easy to deliver.

• If it works, then well done, and more of the same, please.

• And if it doesn’t work so well, then kill the experiment and move on.  No harm done.  Be quick and be ruthless.  You will have tested something, learned from it, and moving on to test something new.

Have you found this article useful?

Why not contribute to the conversation by adding a comment, or bookmarking the site using your Social bookmarks.

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Do you want a lot of visitors to your website? Do you want to waste a lot of money?

I am always amazed at how many businesses forget that a successful Pay Per Click Campaign isn’t simply a matter of getting a lot of visitors to your web site.

Trying to get the maximum number of visitors to your website means you might just burning money if you don’t have a strategy for converting visitors into clients.

In brief, your firm’s PPC strategy has to address three core areas:

• How to get more visitors to your website, at the right price

• How to convert web visitors into fee paying clients

• How to retain your customers, and keep them loyal to your firm.

Of course, Pay Per Click is just one of the broad range of Customer Acquisition techniques, including search engine optimisation, referrals from other websites, email marketing, social networking, all underpinned by any traditional marketing activities.

What do you need to consider when planning a successful Pay Per Click campaign?

The Pay Per Click Advertising Model

Pay Per Click (PPC) is an advertising model that enables you to buy your way to the top of the search engine results. PPC advertisements are those familiar small ads appearing down the right hand margin of the search engine results, as well as the initial few “sponsored links” appearing at the top of the search results

There are three main search marketing advertising networks: Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and MSN AdCenter. With Google having approximately 87% share of the UK search market, many firms focus their efforts on the AdWords service.

PPC advertisers are charged on a cost-per-click basis, meaning your advertisement will display hundreds or thousands of times, but you are only charged when a searcher clicks on your advert, and makes a visit to your website.

As a customer acquisition tool, PPC helps searchers to discover your firm for phrases that your website wouldn’t otherwise rank well for. It offers the possibility that your firm will appear in the first page of the search results, resulting in more visitors coming to your website.

The Advantages of PPC

There are 4 primary advantages to using a PPC advertising service:

1. It’s flexible. You can bid on any number of phrases that can bring potential clients to your website. You might choose to bid for highly specific phrases that reflect your firm’s niche area of expertise, bringing a relatively small number of highly suitable prospects to your website. Or you might bid on generic “solicitor” phrases that will bring a large number and broad variety of potential clients to your site.

2. It’s quick. Your site will appear in the search results, quite literally, immediately. You can change the copy on your advert and have it display instantly. And if a topical issue is mentioned on Radio 4 this morning, you could be displaying an appropriate advert by the start of the working day.

3. It’s controllable. You have full budgetary control, with your own daily advertising limit. When you hit your maximum budget your advertisements simply stop appearing. You can also control the times your ads appear, control where your ad appears, and to a certain extent control who sees your ad.

4. It’s measurable. You will know exactly how many visitors came to your website, and the price you paid per visitor. You can also measure how many of those visitors then converted to a prospect by measuring how many enquiries you received. From there it is a straightforward matter to calculate your final return on investment by comparing the number of your new clients with your PPC spend.

Disadvantages of PPC

Firms express a certain reluctance to use PPC in their marketing mix, raising concerns that include:

1. It can be expensive. PPC Advertising in the legal sector is highly competitive, and it is not uncommon for firms to be willing to pay a premium price for each click, knowing there is a potential client at the other end of the keyboard.

2. It’s temporary. Your ads will continue to appear so long as you continue to pay. Once you stop paying, you will disappear from the search engine results. For this reason, PPC is usually used in conjunction with search engine optimisation with the aim of having your site rank well in the search results without resorting to PPC.

3. It’s a sophisticated process. Pay Per click is not a simple auction like eBay. The highest bidder doesn’t buy his way to the top of the results. Instead, Google AdWords makes use of a “Quality Score” that determines the price you pay, assessing the relevancy of the phrases you’re buying, the quality of your website, your history as an AdWords advertiser. Get the process wrong, and you will be paying over the odds for your clicks. You might want to consider a fully managed Pay Per Click service.

4. It takes time. Careful planning during the set up of your campaign will yield benefits in terms of the price you pay per click. You will also need to monitor your advertising to see which campaigns are successful, and which ones you should cancel. You will need to keep an eye on which ads are bringing new clients, and which ads are just costing clicks but not generating new business.

5. Click Fraud. The fear of competitors fraudulently clicking on your ads and costing your money is a reasonable fear. However, all of the search engines have sophisticated methods for detecting invalid clicks, which includes fraudulent as well as accidental double clicking. Your most important measure has to be your final Return on Investment: how much have you paid on PPC, and how much business has it generated.

Keyword Research

The start of the PPC process is to identify the phrases you will be bidding for. Google provides you with a free keyword research tool that will show you the monthly search volume for your chosen phrases, an indication of the potential Cost Per Click (CPC) and a measure of the advertising competition.

Choosing your key phrases is a fine balancing act: you want to bid on popular phrases in order to get sufficient visitors to your website. But you don’t want to be bidding on popular but highly competitive phrases that might not result in getting a client.

The key metric for your keyword selection is Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) : how much you’re willing to pay to get a new client.

Creating Adverts

The next step is to create your three-line advert that will display for your selected key phrases. Crafting the perfect ad is a time consuming process, and writing a compelling 95-character mini-message is an art. You can experiment with:

1. Including the key phrase in the advert, so that the searcher recognises your ad as matching what they were searching for

2. Including clear benefits as to the service you provide, remember to think the way your client thinks and using language they’ll relate to.

3. Making a strong “call to action” which often takes the form of “Call for a free consultation” or “Ring now:”

4. Make your ad look different. Use short phrases, leaving lots of white space. Use alliteration (”Perfect Pink Presents”) or rhyming. Just make your ad look eye catching and memorable as compared to your competitors.

Landing Pages

The click on a PPC advert leads a visitor to a particular page on your website known as a “landing page.” As an advertiser you need to bear in mind that landing pages serves two purposes: it is the vehicle which will persuade the visitor to do business with your firm, and the landing page is also a crucial factor in AdWords determining your Quality Score, which in turn influences the price you will pay per click.

In terms of conversion, your landing page makes or breaks the deal. It has to be designed to get that all important “most desired response.” Your visitor will decide within milliseconds whether they trust your site, and whether they like your business. And they’ll only spend 7 or 8 seconds looking at the page, so everything needs to be discernible at a single glance.

When designing a landing page, you might want to consider:

1. Is the page specifically about what the visitor searched for? If I searched for conveyancing, then take me directly to your conveyancing page. Do not take me to your Home page and make me search for the right page.

2. Are the benefits of your firm clear, and written in simple, brief, and compelling language?

3. Is the page quick to load?

4. Have you included your main Call to Action, making it easy to see your phone, or including the form for me to fill in.

5. Have you eliminated any unnecessary distractions from the design of the page?

6. Is the page uncluttered, making good use of colour as well as white space and graphics?

Quality Score

Your price per click is determined by advertising competition, and your Quality Score for the phrases your bidding for.

Quality Score is a dynamic metric assigned to each of the key phrases you’re bidding for in your PPC campaign. The higher your Quality Score, the lower the minimum bid you will be charged per click, and the higher position your advert will take in the search results.

Your Quality Score is determined by the relevancy of your key phrase to the other phrases in the same advertising group, the quality of your landing page as well as a number of other historical factors.

One historical factor influencing your Quality Score is your Click Through Rate (CTR.) Your CTR is the number of clicks your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown on the search engines results. Clearly the advertising networks like it when you get the most possible clicks, and they reward you with a lower price per click.

Successful Pay Per Click Advertising

Running successful PPC campaigns is all about the detail: researching your key phrases, organising the structure of your PPC campaign, writing compelling ads, creating powerful landing pages, managing your Quality Score, and most importantly keeping an eye on your budget and Return on Investment.

In May Google AdWords lifted the restrictions to bid on your competitors’ trademarks.

What this means is that you can legitimately use AdWords to buy your competitors’ company name, product names, and trademarks with a view to siphoning off their traffic.

The strategy is to recommend alternatives to their products, and acquire new visitors to your website.

And it could be a great way to get well qualified visitors to your website. Self-selected visitors, giving buying signals, in marketing terms this might be called “low hanging fruit.”

For example, AsdaFinance are busily buying the keyword “Egg”, our lovely Derby based online bank and credit card company:

Little companies are piggy-backing on big company reputations, with what appears to be a small Gloucestershire conservatory company cleverly buying up the Wimpey brand:

I am also aware of some tit-for-tat bidding going on, where you will find that the MoneySuperMarket website is bidding on the phrase “confused.com”, and confused.com is bidding for the phrase “moneysupermarket.”

Google AdWords, of course, is laughing all the way to the bank.

Keep in mind that you are NOT entitled to use the trademark in the ad text itself, and that Google will require the advertiser to remove the trademarked term and prevent them from using it in the future. They will not investigate advertisers using the trademark in the keyword list.

What if you are on the other end of the stick, with competitors buying your branded keywords?

There are a number of different strategies if you want to protect your brand against AdWords raiders. One would be to crowd out the competition by utilising multiple AdWords accounts, multiple websites, and creating multiple ads, like MBNA are currently doing. The risk, of course, is that your ads are competing against yourself, and visitors like me might click on everyone of your ads, and burning your budget.

Alternatively, you can give affiliates free reign to buy your trademarked terms, letting them pay the advertising costs and again dominating the advertising space.