Google adwords is the flagship product of Google Inc, and it is the biggest online advertising platform. Google generates more than 20 Billion US dollars via Google adwords. And yet it is probably the easiest advertising tool to use, you can set up an account with $5, choose targeting country and fill credit card information in, then choose your keywords and landing pages, write an ad copy and that’s it. Literally it can be finished with in 10 mins, super simple!

google adwords tax calculator

Today, I read a post on SEObook and found out this tool designed by ppcblog – Google Adwords Tax Calculator. It attracted my attention immediately. With my experience of managing multiple adwords campaigns containing tens of thousands of keywords and thousands of ad groups, I thought I should be pretty good. So I gave this tool a try, and I still waste 15% of my budget. Of course it might be inaccurate, but I think I should write a post to point out where should Adword newbies be careful about their accounts, Google Adword is easy to use and track ROI, and yet it is also very easy to waste money on it. (Otherwise how can Google earn $20,000,000,000 from it annually?)

Where are the easiest parts on Google Adwords you can waste your money?

We all know that Keyword Quality Score in Google Adwords determines how relevant your keywords are to the advertisement, and the secret of achieving maximum quality score has never been fully revealed. Recently I’ve been testing the impact to quality score by *Click Through Rate* Vs. *Ads relevancy to keywords*, the campaign is targeting local entertainment business. In this case, all the paid search keywords are local keywords, so click through rate was pretty high.

Before show you the results, you may want to watch this video officially released by Google. This is an introduction of Google Ad Auction system by Google Chief Economist Hal Varian. After this video, you will have a better idea why CTR is so important to quality scores.

Are you still creating Google Adwords campaigns and ad groups by manually typing in Google Adwords API? If you have less than 20 ad groups then you will be fine, but what about 200? even 2000 ad groups? This post entry is for those new PPC managers who are struggling with creating massive Google Adwords Campaigns (let’s say 500 ad groups each), but please bear in mind, it is Not any sort of fancy new technique to magically create 500 Ad groups from uploading excel spreadsheet within 2 minutes. Although I would love to see Google to come up with any new functionality to make my life easier, but apparently they cannot just let me finish my job within 5 minutes.

easy and fast create google ad groups

See how fast that man is typing in the picture? You better to be faster than him. In order to get massive ad groups created faster and easier, we need following tools

• Microsoft Office Excel
• Google Adwords Editor
• A bottle of Redbull (it’s boring work, make sure you don’t fall asleep)

This is a post about paid search in SEM. How do you know if your paid search keywords are really used by customers? Do you know there is a big chance that you are wasting money on Google Adwords for useless keywords and you don’t even know? You might say this to against me, “We have well-organised Ad groups with two-words and three words phrase-match keywords that have high quality scores. We also put some negative keywords that prevents irrelevant clicks, the Return-on-Investment(ROI) is positive, therefore we are satisfied.” Well, you did a good job, but you could do a BETTER job if you know exactly what your targeting audiences are searching.

customer's exact google search query

Most of the Google Adwords advertisers have two things in common:

1. Start a new campaign with Brainstorming some keywords and then use Google Adwords Keyword Tool to expand the keywords list, it will more or less contain some guesses even if they are experienced. (I will explain why experience is not always working later)

2. Don’t know how to track exact paid keywords that customers use.

In order to better target right audiences and understand their search behaviors, you have to know what search queries your customers type in search engines.  So let us resolve these two problems one by one.

It is nearly two years since I first touched Google Analytics and I’ve been in search engine marketing industry for approximately one year. I never call myself a Google Analytics expert, not only because I am not experienced enough in online marketing industry, but also due to massive data it provides and there are so many ways to analyse.

mess up google analytics

Today I want to sum up some problem I met and few mistakes I made using Google Analytics once I just started my career as an online marketing consultant. This entry is to share my experience in the past, and also, remind myself there is still a long way to go and I have to keep hard-working.