New AdWords Certification

This week saw Google introduce a new method of certification for their AdWords platform. They have introduced a very thorough set of training pages for anyone to work through, and then you need to take the Google Advertising Fundamentals Exam, plus one more Advanced Advertising Exam. The exams have also been re-vamped with more ideal situations of best practices and real-time situations rather than a simple recall of knowledge like the ones in the past. Full details here.



The benefits of having a clickable badge with your credentials shown to the public directly from Google can have a massive impact on sales for an SEO, but it's also a great thing for any in-house advertising professional to have, and can help in cutting out your budget and getting the most from your advertising budget. Even if you have no intention of taking the exam, you can work your way through the training programme to improve your overall knowledge.

I offer Barcelona AdWords managment and set up, as well as long term website optimisation. Contact me for a chat about your website and how we can drive more traffic together.

AdWords Invitation Again

While it seems many are still feeling the effects of a the financial downturn, the monster that is Google reported 6.6 billion dollars revenue recently. No-one is denying the firm's amazing grasp on today's current market share, and if anyone can topple Apple's current iphone monopoly, it could just be Google (but maybe not with the nexus one). Indeed, CEO Eric Schmidt will be touching down in Barcelona next month for the 3GSM Mobile Phone conference.


However, maybe the above article has more to tell, as investors were less than pleased with the revenue created in the last release. Cue my typical letter through the post for an invitation to Google's AdWords programme. I'm not quite sure why Google assume I'm not already using AdWords, or have not in the past, but still the letters come.

This time, the offer was for 75 Euros to spend on AdWords, with the usual annoyance of this only applying to new accounts of less than 14 days validity. So that's really 75 Euros minus the $5 Google makes you pay to set up the account then? The amount goes down if I don't "claim" my credit before 28th February - a clever trick to get users in the door asap.

As I've explained before, this "hook" is an easy way for Google to make more money, given that the majority of small businesses would leap at the chance to have a free 75 Euros spend on AdWords, perhaps not knowing the cost per click of their chosen keywords. AdWords interface is sufficiently complicated for you to plug away until you have a campaign and a couple of adgroups set up for a free 75 Euros, but the enticement is there once that 75 Euros is spent - they already have your credit card, and you have your campaign set up, so all you need to do is leave it live - temptation is great.

Depsite there being some great online resources from Google themselves to learn more about AdWords, it's not all that well publicised, and I suspect that many people will be sucked into throwing away lots of cash on campaigns which are not optimised, or which they have no idea of how to manage. It's also fairly well known that ads can appear on poor choices of the content network, and that default settings such as broad match are always left on, meaning an initial 2 or 3 day campaign can throw away money before refinement is carried out.

Do you have an AdWords account which needs attention? I offer AdWords set up and management in Barcelona as well as other Pay Per click campaigns. Contact me at Barcelona SEO for more details.

AdWords Hook - Part 2

After my recent post on Google's intent on gaining new customers by offering thousands of euros in online advertising through their adwords programme, I was surprised to receive this week, yet another letter through the post offering me another incredible 50 Euros coupon (it came as an AdSense user, so maybe that's why it was 50% less than last time?!)



Considering Google has a 95% market share in Spain according to comscore, it just makes you wonder how much google are making in online ads, and clicks from people who don't know how to set up an AdWords account properly. I have encountered a high proportion of customers who have dabbled in AdWords or other PPC platforms, and have cringed when I've seen their accounts - exactly the same as what I was doing when I started.

I can offer AdWords and Pay Per Click management in Barcelona as well as thorough training to help with any campaigns you might have running or want to start - and if it's soon, I have 150 euros worth of credit to offer you for free ;o) I also offer excellent website optimisation in Barcelona to improve your positioning in google and other search engine's rankings. Please feel free to contact me for more details.

The Google AdWords Hook - By Post

Like many of you, I'm sure, this morning I received through the post an invitation to Free 100 € credit for an AdWords account. The promotion is only valid until the 26th July, and comes with a personal code for you to reclaim your credit.

The leaflet is very clear, and states such benefits of "Earning clients with Google" with such ease of Three Easy steps. Create an Ad, Choose the keywords for your daily budget, and your clients will click and reach your company.

So, where's the catch? Well, the leaflet is clearly based at people who have little or absolutely no idea what Google AdWords is (it's only mentioned once on the whole 4-page leaflet), and they even have a 902 number where you can call and a "Google specialist" will help you create and set up your first AdWords account. And therein lies the catch. The coupon code if for accounts of less that 14 days old. The majority of first time users of an AdWords account will have useless keywords, far too broad, and even probably take heed of the keyword suggestion tool (basically encouraging you to spend more money). Depending on your sector/niche, the 100 Euros gift could be used up very quickly in clicks. However, you will be so tied up with the adwords campaign (which you have probably put a lot of effort into or spent money on the 902 number) that you'll want to continue, and will probably keep spending badly for hopeless clicks for another couple of months before either deciding that "it doesn't work/it's too expensive" - either that, or pay for a professional to have a tweak and set out a quality campaign. So it's a win-win situation for Google who'll probably easily make back the 100 € gift.

Have you received one of these through the post? What do you think? Please contact me for AdWords Management in Barcelona and for any other elements of Search Engine Optimisation in Barcelona I'll be happy to help.

Google Image Ads for AdWords

For many of you using AdWords in Google for your pay per click campaign, a new tool has been launched by Google regarding content displayed ads. These are ads which show on Google's partner sites, or anyone who has AdSense, for example, and until recently had been limited to text ads, rather like the ads you would see on a normal SERP of Google.

I have tried out a few ads, and although it took me a while to find one of my own ads on a content site (!), then I think it's a great addition. There are a number of templates to choose from, and the Google image ad wizard guides you through the process of creating an ad, before saving it for you.

I think it's a great addition to the old ads, as you can have images, logos, even small graphics, or flash-type animation (albeit basic), but if you can make an ad that stands out on a page, then I say go for it - if there are 9 ads showing on the same page, and yours is the only image ad, then you have higher chance of being seen and therefore clicked on.

This is also a great tool for branding, as you can have your company logo in on the ad, and if you choose for example the option of cost per impression (CPM)rather than cost per click, then it means you're getting your barnd out there and being seen even if people don't end up clicking on your link.

You can then follow the results of your new image ad with the Placement Performance Report (PPR) - a detailled report on clicks, impressions, conversions and cost of the ad throughout the google content network.

Try it out, and let me know how it goes, I'd be surprised if your comments aren't positive!

I offer AdWords training and Managment in Barcelona for Google and other Pay Per click campaigns. Please contact me at Barcelona SEO and I'll be happy to chat about your business and opportunities.

Google AdWords Part 2 – tweaking your ads to lower the costs of a click.

Although Google’s algorithms are extremely effective in delivering the correct search results, sometimes a site could rank well for non-related search terms, and it’s probably happened to us on more than one occasion. Searching for a room to rent in Barcelona, might throw up a real estate website, or Tourist apartments in Barcelona company. The same can happen in your Adwords ads, and you may receive clicks for people searching for something similar to your product, but not exactly what they were looking for. This can be frustrating, as you pay for the click anyway, and this starts to use up your budget. So as well as adding your keywords to your ads, you can also add negative campaign words, which can often halve your spending budget.
Let’s use the same example as my last post, the Airport transfer company. Clicks may have come through for “limousine transfer” and if the company has no limousines in their fleet, then this is a good one to take out. Baby chairs, bike racks, etc. are all things to consider and to check in the campaign statistics, too – you can see where this goes.


Another way to save costs with your ads is placement of the ads. All ads need to have a default amount and a maximum amount that you want to pay for a click on the ad. This means that you may have to cough up a fair amount of money if your market sector is competitive. People usually look at a few of the sponsored ads, not just 1 and 2 at the top. Those at the right often receive just as many clicks – often more, as they are at the same height as the organic results, so easy on the eye. Changing your preferences to never appear in position 1 or 2, but no lower than 5 for example can save you a lot of money.

Using Ad variations is another sure fire winner. You create similar ads to your main idea, and Google rotates your ad variations, making sure they have an even distribution, and you can work out which are the most effective. For example, one particular call to action may work better than others, or Capitalising the first letter of each word, for example (all Caps are not allowed, neither are excessive exclamation marks, things like this). This will then show you how to re-create this success in the rest of your ads across the other campaigns.

I offer professional AdWords set up and managment and training as part of my SEO services. For more details, please contact me or leave a comment.

Google AdWords

Google has a variety of tools available for webmasters to make life easier and direct traffic to your website. One of the most effective and quickest methods is Adwords. This is a paid service whereby you appear alongside the normal “organic” results of a search term, at the top of the page or at the sides, as “sponsored results”. You can track your results and percentage of clicks against the number of times your ad has been displayed. This is called the click through rate (CTR). You can also set up what is called conversion tracking, which measures how many times people actually click on the call to action (CTA) you are promoting - maybe that’s the “buy now” button, or “send me thr brochure”, etc. Adwords is very simple to set up, but most people make the same mistakes, and whilst it is possible to put a limit to the amount of money you want to spend, it’s easy to go over budget. Here I’ll try to explain a few ways of getting around that.


Adwords is split into various sections: campaigns, Adgroups and ads. The biggest mistake by most people is to set up 1 campaign group with 1 ad group and many ads running. Due to the amount of variables you can control within your account, this is a bad move. The best idea is to have 3 or 4 campaigns running, each with a different target – you can target countries, languages, other sites for your ads to appear (Content network) and even days of the week, and times of the day. Even with these 5 variables, you can see how specific you can target your advertisements to reach your prospective clients.



Within each campaign, it’s important to have various Adgroups. It’s probably good to give an example at this point. Let’s take the example of an airport transfer company here in Barcelona. You could have 5 campaigns in English targeting (for example) the UK and Ireland, USA, Scandinavia and then the rest of Europe. Then the 5th could be in Spanish for Spain and South America. Each ad group could target content network, weekends and weekdays. Each ad could use variations on times shown (especially for those in different time zones, obviously!), then target different keywords and variations on these keywords – plurals, mis-spellings. At this point it’s important to have ad variations – with different call to actions (phrases such as “call now”, or “see more” etc.) to see later through the stats which work better than others. There are more little tools to tweak, but I don’t want to get into too much detail too soon.

I offer professional AdWords set up and managment and AdWords Training in Barcelona as part of my SEO services. For more details, please contact me or leave a comment.