any one use google adwords

I have just received an invitation pack from Google in the post, promoting their "Engage for Agencies" programme. It's an impressive package containing a set of postcards, and a tin containing "business card" size Adwords vouchers.

What strikes me here, is that a massive online company, such as Google, is all too aware of the power of direct mail, which they have cleverly integrated into their marketing.

Excellent work, Google

Adwords is really great for start up businesses, it give your instant marketing! Just one thing, if you're doing it yourself make sure you plan and budget properly. Possibly use an online credit card provider like EntroPay to do all your PPC budgeting if you have multiple campaigns.

Good luck!

Just out of curiosty, what do you have to do to become Google certified at adwords? Tick multiple choice boxes in a test paper? I'm just curios as qualifications these days seem to hold less weight and credibility than they did of years gone by.... I'm PCI DSS certified, ticked a few boxes and paid

Hi Barney,

I'm Google Certified.

It's a bit harder these days since they updated the exams a couple of years ago.

As a minimum you have to sit two exams. One fundamental and then one specialist area. Both are over 100 questions each.

If you genuinely manage Adwords accounts daily then you should pass it without any problems.

The biggest issue I sometimes have is that the answer to the questions are not always the right ones. You have to answer how you think Google would want you rather than what you know will work in Adwords!

It's a bit like passing your driving test. We are all taught how to pass the test but once you pass you then really start to learn to drive.

I always say to people that if someone has passed the exam then it shows some commitment to their craft but it doesn't guarantee competence.

I certainly would not hire an Adwords professional who did not have the qualification because if they are too lazy to take the exam then I'd guess they are too lazy to manage my account properly.

Cheers
Mike

Not expert, only have few hundreds pounds google adwords experience on restaurants.
1. Easy to spend money, but not easy to have return
2. set manual payment
3. set at least more than one ads
4. use voucher for the first time only
5. worth paying expert and learning
6. connect with Google place
7. read help online

Please call Google (0800 number) for any questions, instant answer.

Adwords is a great platform to generate instant traffic to your website.

It isn't as easy as ABC though. Google Adwords has a great online training manual for newcomers. Simply search for "Google Adwords Fundamentals" for the manual.

I suggest anyone who is new to Adwords to use that. Running an effective ad campaign is a lot trickier than you'd think. There's lots to consider. If you don't get it right you can end up losing money from day one, which is a bad thing for any start up business. Do your research first!

we've just launched our site using Google PPC and it's been really interesting to tie Adwords into Analytics to track the success of the PPC campaign. We went as far to implement button tracking so we can see how users navigate round the site and where they click to sign up.

PPC is good if your launching a web application and you're worried about load on your servers and bandwidth as you can start and stop your campaign whenever you like.

If you can get one of Google's free Adwords vouchers, it's great to start you off.

One strange thing though, once you've set up a Google account with an email address, you can never register another with the same email ever again (even after cancelling). We found this out as many of Google promotions only work with brand new accounts.

We started with our Adwords campaign a couple of weeks ago, and until now I'm still in the learning and exploring process. I'm a bit worried cos I'm running 3 campaigns for 3 different target geo. I don't really understand how the cost are being computed. My advice is that I think it would be better to put a limit on your daily budget and set it in Auto so Google decides or budget the cost for you.

It's worth running it for a week or so with a few different campaigns ads so you can see how you're getting on and what people are clicking on. If you can get hold of a voucher, it's always good to start you off.

After a week or so you can also make some decisions about display network (ad on other web sites) Vs search network.

I agree it's always worth setting a limit so you know where you are with it.

In our first week we found that most of the traffic came from referals which I found quite suprising. Also you can add campaign parameters to your URLs so you can be pretty certain where the visit came from.

Our marketing chap is managing ours for the time being so I'm interested to learn from him so I know what everything means in that big control panel!