Search Marketing Sage

As a Search Marketing Agency, we have a lot of employees that are obsessed about squeezing every bit of performance possible out of our clients Pay Per Click Advertising.  Search Marketing User Interfaces give multiple metrics to help advertisers see how they are doing.  But as an agency that deals with millions of PPC clicks every month, we learn pretty quickly with the scale of the data we get to work with what metrics really make a difference in delivering conversion/lead/sales success and what metrics don’t.

If conversions are the goal of your advertising, then the first rule of managing your PPC account is “Not all clicks are created equal.”  PPC is a “meritocracy”.  The clicks that convert get all of the love, affection, increased max Cost Per Click bids and Budget.  The keywords that don’t convert get minimized with lower bids and eventually even paused.  There is no such thing as a “No keyword left behind” in a successful PPC account.  It’s possible to do a keyword “reclamation project” by improving the post click experience of keywords that historically not converted with custom landing pages, but you still have to rely on the data at your disposal on what you decide to do with your keywords.

In preparation for taking the Google Advertising Professional Exam I devoted the majority of my time studying in the Google AdWords Learning Center.

The Learning Center is a resource provided by Google to assist those advertising on Google the ins and outs of AdWords. It offers both multimedia and text lessons which are organized by topic areas that build upon one another.

So in the Learning Center I spent my time reading the text lessons, watching the corresponding video, and testing my level of comprehension on the various topic lesson with the corresponding quiz (if available).

Given the wealth of questions all created about a platform which has an element of mystery in relation to its exact inter workings, it was only a matter of time before I ran into some questions which, when taken too literally, resulted in mass confusion on my behalf. In order for me to be able to keep my sanity and ensure that I didn’t allow the Learning Center quiz questions to get the best of me, I tried to incorporate a little humor into my studying.

Listed below are my top 5 most interesting learning center references. Some illustrate things to look out for when taking the Google Professional Exam…and some are just funny: