AdWords training resources
-
Hi guys,
Aside from Google certification, can anyone suggest a good training program for Adwords? I'm studying their materials, but more formal training, where I can be tested in my knowledge and improve in certain areas as necessary. I want something with videos with demonstrations.
Going from organic SEO to SEM and am frightened!
Thanks,
Sarah -
Thank you EGOL. That's a common theme I hear - start small, trial and error. As for costs and expenses .... it remains to be seen. I'm on the ground level in terms of both the new products and digital advertising in general. Right now I'm doing preliminary research for the benefit of our budget next year, which is how I ended up tinkering around in there and realizing I'm going to need some deeper-level training.
-
Thank you Kevin. I'll definitely check those out!
-
One thing that come with the PLA ads, in my opinion, is an even high level of price competition. So the same forces that make it difficult to succeed with Adwords are still in play.
I have not tried remarketing/retargeting.
My approach at present it to compete in the organic SERPs as an MSRP seller. I have great organic visibility (especially long tail), a lot of traffic and sell a few items that my competitors ignore. My site also gives great service to the visitor through content and video - no competitor is even close to matching. So, we are still making lots of sales at MSRP. This yields good profits on every sale.
I am also running Adsense across the site. I don't think that it damages sales very much and it produces income with zero work. So, I am happy not to be doing PPC and actually glad that my competitors are staying busy making lots of sales at very low profit margins.
-
EGOL, What about PLA? What about Remarketing/Retargeting? Are you able to make money on either of those?
-
Buy the easy books and tinker around. Be ready to lose money. But if you keep at it and keep doing your math and eventually you will get better.
But, bottom line... Can you compete with the big boys on costs and expenses? You can be a small biz genius but if you don't have the numbers you are not going to make money.
100% honesty here. I love math. I know my numbers. I have done LOTS of adwords training and even more self study. I get killed at Adwords for most products. Why? I am up against people who have a 20% merchandise cost advantage and a 15% shipping cost advantage.
I could have Mahalanobis doing my math and would still get killed. Because my competitors have a huge advantage on costs and expenses.
-
His typical Adwords seminar is two days. The first morning is about keywords and ads. Everybody is watchin', sippin' coffee and smilin'.
Then the math starts after lunch. I sit in the front and turn around..... quite a few of the people behind me are using their phones or are watching the screen with a "10,000 mile stare".
The second day... quite a few people are not there.... by the afternoon the math nerds are the only people left along with a few people with the 10,000 mile stare.
Now, I am not saying that he is a bad teacher. He is fantastic. Fantastic. He says there during every break, during lunch, back early after lunch, stays late to answer EVERY question. The problem is everybody thinks that makin' money from Adwords is easy, you just write an ad and pay 5 cents a click. Then they realize that they are up against genius people who have rock bottom costs who are really hungry.
-
Try viewing the Lynda tutorial on it (the site has great tutorials--but I have never viewed this one). Also, Perry Marshall has a great book on adwords. Adwords get's extremely complicated and expect to many mistakes. Do your best at minimize them as much as possible and watch the numbers DAILY! Good luck!
-
For example, if I purchased the latest "For Dummies" book, would it even be timely enough? I'm looking for something at that level to get started.
-
This looks more advanced that I need at this point, but I need to bookmark this for later. Can you recommend any entry-level training?
-
Are Brad's materials something a non-numbers person can pick up? Or is it going to be totally over their head? I'm willing to learn.
-
I was afraid of that. I am definitely a writer and not a numbers person. Luckily I've been collaborating with an analyst, but I need to know this stuff on my own.
-
If you have not done so, consider reading. Advanced Google Adwords by Brad Geddes. I have read it twice, and reread some parts of it many times. Best book anywhere for adwords.
If you are spending major money on PPC then you must attend Brad's Adwords Seminars. This is two days of intense training for Adwords. This is not a fluffy seminar. The first morning covers the basics and then you get deep into spreadsheet math.
Adwords is not a word game, it is a math game. This is not a seminar where you will sit, sip coffee, fart and go home an expert. You are going to do lots of math that will require you to think VERY HARD. But if you can learn what is being taught you will definitely make a lot more money and your competitors will be making a lot less.
Making money with Adwords is very difficult for me. More difficult than SEO. Why? You are competing against the entire resources of your competitor. They might have lower cost inventory, cheaper shipping, cheaper labor. If they get 60% off MSRP and you get 40% off MSRP then they can spend that 20% on Adwords and still make the same profit that you do. But if you bid enough to compete with them then you lost 20% off the top, then pay credit card fees, shipping from manufacturer to you, labor, shipping supplies. You just made zero profit.
My suppliers are often the ones who bid against me on adwords. Really really hard to beat them when they have huge cost and expense advantages.
Like I say, Adwords is a game for the people are really good at math, have highly skilled people making a website that converts customers like greased pigs, and are cut-throat competitors on costs and expenses.
You better know your numbers or you will lose your shirt.
-
P.S. I did research this, just looking for word-of-mouth recs. Thanks!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Search Volume, Organic Rankings and Adwords
Hi, I hope you can help. And if this has been answered before, I apologise. Just spent two hours searching but couldnt find much at all. So I have this website, and it ranks in the top 10 for around 150 keywords. Its fairly niche market for targeting the UK market, but subject is for a local area, its got a good optimised site, no link issues, works well, good UI etc. Problem I have is this. It used to get a fair amount of organic traffic a few years ago to generate around 30 leads a day, and back then that was from just one keyword. Today, we may get one a lead a day from organic even though we rank for a lot more keywords and our exposure all round is good. However, we also pay for adwords to make up for the lost leads, the same keywords we are ranking for organically! So we bid on adwords and get our 30 leads with the same keywords and monthly search volume as we have organically, yet we dont get any leads for those keywords organically. So Adwords produces leads, organic doesn't, but they are the same keywords and rank next to each other. How does that work? So my question is, why do our organic keywords that rank just under the adwords that we bid for, with the same monthly searches, only give us 1 lead a day (when they used to give us 30) and adwords now give us 30 leads a day? Thanks James
Paid Search Marketing | | jaimo6930 -
Return of investment on spend on google adwords
Hi Running an adwords campaign for a builders/construction company namely double glazing what sort of return of investment could I expect to get on a return of £4000 per month? I know its a million dollar question but any insight or thoughts would be appreciated, especially on tracking ROI for example in this case it's just leads via a contact form on potential conservatory, windows or doors work which would be followed up via phone and an onsite visit.
Paid Search Marketing | | offonhols0 -
Impressions data: Google Webmaster Tools VS Google AdWords
Dear community, I was doing some research within Google Webmaster Tools (WMT) keyword data when I noticed that the impressions within this tool are quite different compared to the keyword impression data provided by Google AdWords (ADW). Some specs about the situation: Date: December 2014 (31 days). Keyword: brand + main keyword* (e.g. amazon shoes, if Amazon would have been the client) Visitors come from: the Netherlands (>97%). Search volume: 3,8 K for this branded keyword last year (December 2013), of which >99% came from the Netherlands (source: Google Keyword Planner). Search query data: "impressions" for Google WMT (organic keyword impressions) and “impressions” for Google ADW (paid keyword impressions). Of course the ADW keyword is [exact]. So, what's wrong? The data doesn’t match, while I expected approximately the same amount of impressions assuming the keywords are: both [exact] keywords; (check! ✓) within the same period of time; (check! ✓) the Ad is being displayed "all the time" (check! ✓) the domain/page is being indexed "all the time" (check! ✓) How much of a difference is there? Organic impressions: 7,4 K (source: Google WMT) Paid impressions: 2,1 K (source: Google ADW) Note that the search volume according to Google Keyword Planner of last year is somewhere in between: 3,8K. The search volume from this tool of last December is not available just yet (but I don’t expect much difference here since Google Trends shows a steady search volume). If the difference would have been 10-20%, I wouldn't be surprised at all, but this is huge. **What could explain the differences? ** If a lot of people were using AdBlockers (they do, but not nearly as massively (around 10%)). If we would have made mistakes in AdWords: budget, bidding, targeting etc. - This is not the case, got this confirmed by the manager who double-checked the data and settings. Also: since it’s a branded keyword it’s really cheap for us and easy to get high quality scores. If we would have made mistakes regarding indexing/crawling that would have caused an extreme loss in domain visibility in the SERP's: possibly caused by robots.txt, a noindex-tag, server problems etc. This was not the case and Google WebmasterTools says the average position was 1,0 during the complete month. "Something else" went wrong during that specific period of time with this specific domain. I don’t think so because I checked multiple months and multiple other domains of other clients. These gave me the same relative results (okay, some were a bit closer: 30 K paid impressions vs 62 K organic impressions for instance, still a big difference). What other possibilities are left? The impressions from Google WMT and Google ADW are not the same, even though they are called the same and therefore suggest they should be (about) the same. AdWords just randomly fails to display and/or measure some branded ads (even though there is plenty of budget, bidding is fine and QS is 10/10). Definitions of "impressions" for both tools according Google: AdWords definition of "impressions" WebmasterTools definition of "impressions" Hope someone has some more suggestions or useful links! Thanks in advance! Ektor Tsolodimos
Paid Search Marketing | | BlueMango0 -
Blocking google adwords on google.com?
Is there any chance to block google adwords (not google adsense) firefox/chrome/internet explorer 🙂
Paid Search Marketing | | FCRMediaLietuva0 -
Why doesn't exact match appear to be working for me in Google AdWords tool?
Hi guys, I recently read Rand's article here and tried out the exact match symbols on my keywords. However, these don't appear to be working for me as the results aren't showing up as they do in the above SEOmoz article (attached screenshot). What am I doing wrong? Google_AdWords__Keyword_Tool-20130511-115528.jpg.jpg?resizeSmall&width=832
Paid Search Marketing | | featherseo0 -
Do Google Autofill and Instant Search affect Adwords' Keyword Tool reports?
While performing keyword research around the term "windows", I noticed the keyword "windo" gets 18,000 global monthly searches with .23 competition. Why is this? Do y'all think the Google Autofill and Instant Search features affect reports generated by using the Google Adwords keyword tool? For example, if a user starts typing a search query only to find the site they were looking for before they finished typing the search query, does Google count the partial keyword the user never finished typing into the Adwords Keyword report? I've always wondered about this. Sometimes I find it tempting to attack a misspelled keyword because of the massive search volume and low competition for that keyword. I realize that many consumers may not be very good at spelling, and this may reflect a large search volume towards a misspelled keyword. On the other hand, I see this trend of high volume, misspelled keywords many times while performing keyword research for a variety of clients. Thanks.
Paid Search Marketing | | GlobeRunner0 -
Anyone sad to see Adwords Position Preference Go?
Is Google saying, "Why keep offering a service that doesn’t work?" or "Let's make more money."?
Paid Search Marketing | | Thos0030