Its no secret that I extremely dislike arbitrage sites and splogs, I’ve stated it hundreds of times here. Splogs and arbitrage sites are the bane to any search marketers existence and as purely a consumer, they crap up my internet, so when I see SEOBook reporting that Google and Yahoo are cracking down on arbitrage sites, its makes me happy.

The one thing I do not like about this story though, is the misuse of terminology.

Aaron Wall states

Google and Yahoo want a direct relationship with publishers and merchants. They hate virtually any type of affiliate that is not a highbrow relationship.

This statement is not entirely true. While Goog and Yahoo want to eliminate arbitrage “affiliate” sites, i do not believe they have anything against your typical affiliate relationship. If they did, they’d really lose a nice chunk of revenue because there are whole industries that only affiliates use PPC (ie “Web Hosting”).

Its a minor detail but I don’t like people making a blanket statement like that, especially with a high visibility blog like Aaron’s, which happens to be one of my favorite industry blogs.

This maybe hard to believe (and watch) but someone actually created a Paid Search 101 Rap

SFW but watch at your own risk.

Some of you maybe seeing higher MIn CPCs lately well an Adwords Rep has confirmed Google did a re-evaluation of Keyword Quality Scores across the board. Google is always re-evaluating quality scores on a keyword by keyword basis, but every once in a while they change the algo and re-evaluate all keywords. The ones that have low performance across the system, and also low performance across the respective account, are usually affected the most.

What to do:
Run a Google keyword report (for a few days time frame) and then sort by Min CPC. For any keywords that have $10 or $5 dollar min
CPC, you can try isolating them in there own ad group and writing ad copy (without Dynamic Keyword Insertion) that uses that keyword multiple times (once in the title and as many times in the ad copy as possible, and maybe at the end of the display URL as well). The Rep couldn’t guarantee that this would improve the Quality score (and in turn lower the Min CPC), but it’s your best shot.

SERoundtable had a poll this morning that I thought was interesting, its a ‘What is your highest CTR’? poll. Just about anyone who runs any kind of paid search account would tell you this is such an arbitrary question it can’t possibly be accurate. Account Level? Campaign level? Keyword level? Ad Level? I have a 90% CTR on a keyword for the month of January ‘08, do i win? Sure its a branded word but no one said that didn’t count!

Anyway, as I was checking out one of my clients high performing ads, i happened across a semi-competitor’s ad and nearly spit out my drink from laughter.

This is a classic example of how to NOT write your PPC ads:

I’ll be honest, I don’t use the content network that much or at all for a variety of reasons but I know there are the select few who it does work for. If you are one of those few and would like to keep your ads from showing up in people’s email, Barry at SERoundTable <a href=”http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/015982.html”>points out</a> how to use Google’s Site Exclusion tool to add ‘gmail.com’ to the list of excluded sites.

While this is a good work around, it would be really fantastic if Google actually allowed this type of control in advertisers accounts, rather than forcing any content network users into networks like gmail.com.

It’s no secret that Google updated it’s Adwords Placement algo yesterday and while many of its effects are being talked about in places like the WebMasterWorld Forums there are a couple of other changes that are not being picked up by the masses. Yet.

Since last year sometime Google has been on a mission to stomp out its advertisers who are using Adwords for arbitrage and affiliate marketing and this recent update is no different.

While its key feature was the top placement adjustment, which in layman’s terms means to get that top spot you are more likely to pay closer to your MAX CPC for that click. I assume the logic is that if you are willing to pay more per click than you are more relevant than the next guy. The only way it makes sense to me is simple put into 3 words; “Google Money Grab.” This seems to be a popular term for Google this year, every time they to an “update” people are seeing increased CPCs.

Thankfully, most of my clients haven’t seen any side effects of the update (gotta love good account organization!) but I was talking to my friend Scott this morning about the effects seen by some people who run affiliate marketing campaigns via Adwords. A lot of these affiliate marketers were seeing a huge decrease in click activity, if not no clicks at all. After a few IM conversations and phone calls Scott and I were able to determine something pretty huge…….Google hates affiliate marketers Oh, you say you already knew that did ya, well we were also able to determine that affiliates using one account to run campaigns for multiple merchants were hit the hardest, while accounts used to run a single merchant campaign were not noticeably affected.

If this holds up, its going to be a royal pain in the ass for a lot of affiliate marketers. Setting up separate accounts for each merchant is a time consuming process.

We will keep you posted if anything new develops with this update.

and I

Just a quick reminder for those of you using MSN adCenter that on Aug 29th they will be turning on their content network and that means opting you in it. While I’m a bigger fan of MSN content network vs Google’s, I’m still not a fan of using content network, at least not for my clients so I will be making sure to turn this off.

I just finished taking my Adwords Professional exam in order to re-up my “Adwords Professional Certification” and I have determined that Google wants you to fail! I have some beef with this thing and here is why.

First off, I had to pay $50 AGAIN to re-certify myself. I’ve already had to do this once, why did I have to pay again? Does Google really need my $50? I’m not sure why, but that just rubs me the wrong way. I don’t have to pay to renew my license, why should they make me pay to renew their made up certification? Ok, my real beef isn’t with the cost of the re-certification, it is the exam itself.

While Google has a great resource center for you to study adwords and take some practice quizzes, it doesn’t help much when the questions aren’t updated on the actual exam! I finished this exam with a pretty good amount of time leftover so I went back through and looked at some of the questions that I thought were ridiculous and even took some screencaps of some to prove that I’m not completely crazy.

For example, this question regarding Google image ads: As you can see the question asks for 3 responses. Now, A & B are pretty obvious but C is definitely wrong because image ads don’t show on Google searches, and D. is definitely wrong because according to the Adwords Help Center that maximum number of allowed images is 500 not 50!

Another example is this question which as you can see by the red highlight boxes says “Select ALL that Apply”. I may not be the world’s smartest man but I do know that with RADIO buttons you can only choose 1! Its not a major issue but just a real annoyance to me.

Finally, near the end of the exam it was asking about mobile ads which I admittingly have little experience with at this point in time, so when I ran into these questions I tried to consult the Adwords Help Center, the only problem with that was…. IT’S IN ITALIAN! Yes, the English section on Mobile ads is in Italian which I personally don’t think is the most conducive to helping people pass this test. I’m from NORTH CAROLINA, not Milan!

For some reason, Google wants you to fail!

Todd Malicoat has an excellent, albeit it slightly less bitter, post with some tips about re-upping your certification for those who need to prepare.

If you are wondering, don’t worry, I got a 95.6%

Here are some more bogus questions for the Adwords Professional Exam:
Item 79 of 111 Using AdWords, advertisers can target their ads by _____.
A. postal code
B. telephone area code
C. latitude and longitude
D. a user’s age as specified in their user preferences on Google

–I’m pretty sure you can target by postal code and Latitude and longitude!

Item 103 of 111 When you have multiple ads in the same Ad Group, you can view all of these ads _____.
A.on the Campaign Summary page
B.below your keyword list on the Ad Group detail page
C.above your keyword list on the Ad Group detail page
D.next to your keyword list on the Ad Group detail page

-An example of an outdated question. If you want to look at all of your ads at once, Google has put them into a nice and neat TABBED format. The answer is B since this was the old way, but if you haven’t been using Adwords for that long, you’d have no way of knowing this.

Which statement about ads created with double byte characters is true?
A.They must not use single byte characters.
B.They must have 16 characters per ad text.
C.They must use single byte characters for punctuations and currency.
D.They must be triggered only by keywords created with double byte characters.
Good luck finding that answer in the help center, I think I guessed B.

Grouping keywords in a single Ad Group that shares a central theme helps improve performance the most when ads are shown on _____.
A.AOL
B.Google
C.search pages
D.content pages
Does anyone want to explain the difference of A,B and C to me?

Your client wants to target potential customers in France, and English speakers around the world using only one campaign. Which option would reach this audience?
A.Target all countries and all languages.
B.Target the country France only. Target languages English and French.
C.Target the countries France and the United States. Target ads to English only.
D.Target the United Kingdom and the United States. Target languages French and English.
None of these seem like the right answer to me.

If you manage several AdWords accounts and have created a standard password for all of your client’s accounts, which additional information is needed to access the client account?
A.a customer ID number for the account
B.a unique password created for the account
C.the unique login email address for the account
D.the credit card information on file for the account
Thats what the MCC is for!

What is a benefit of using broad matches with negative keywords, instead of exact match keywords by themselves?
A.Your ad will attract more traffic.
B.You don’t have to update the keyword list.
C.You can create keyword lists more quickly.
D.You can be certain which keyword the user searched.

A & C seem correct here.

And Finally, even the tutorial quizzes need to be updated, one answer says that if on invoicing you have 15 days to pay to avoid suspension of your account when in the Adwords help system is says “oogle reserves the right to suspend or close down your AdWords account if we do not receive payment within 30 business days of the monthly invoice date and/or you exceed the monthly credit limit.”

Haha, ok that maybe a bit of an exaggeration to everyone other than myself but the folks over at PPCHero Blog emailed me and asked me to answer a few questions for an e-interview.

You can read my wisdom at PPCHero here

found via SharpLogic