becoming a google adwords professional

[ozchris]

I've played with Adwords in the past for my personal sites, but now it is to become part of my job at work, and I'm to do my utmost to become a Google Adwords Professional.

Keeping it job related, I guess I should open a new Adwords account with the work email address, apply for Google Advertising Professional login so I can open a My client Centre account, and then move some of the existing accounts from work under that umbrella, and start being responsible for them.

Then after 3 months and after meeting volume requirements, I will sit the Adwords Professional exam.

Does this all sound right. Is it possible to open a new Adwords account without setting up an ad straight away, as prompted by the signin procedure?

Apart from the Learning Center, is there any Adwords training or gurus you would recommend learning from? I've been poring through various forums for the last few days, and obviously experience will be the greatest teacher, but I'd love any hints from people that would be of use.

I did ask for the recommended approach thru Adwords help but haven't had an answer in 3 days, so would love to hear from people here, things to avoid, things to do etc.

[RFA]

don't know if this will help but being good at adwords does not imply good sales. Your campaigns have to be well planned and thought but the website has to be well designed to turn a visitor into a buyer. Always make sure you have a monthly budget. Prepare carefully your keywords and text description.... then the market will lead your action or reaction. Track your results closely and adapt.

that's all I can really say...

see ya

[AxiomTrend]

Yeah, you have it pretty much outlined right.

Depending on your situation at work, I would recommend using a personal email address for setting up a new Adwords account to use as your "My Client Center" account management. The reason being, if you end up going to work for someone else, you can take your Google Advertising Professional credentials with you and use your "My Client Center" for other accounts, perhaps even at your next job. The AdWords account that you will be managing will still retain it's seperate loggin access, and the Client Manager Account Access to any given AdWords account can be enabled or disabled at any time. So there would be no control issues if you were to leave your current employer.

You do have to create a campaign when setting up a new AdWords account, but you can pause it right after you create it. So that's no big deal.

There is lots of great tips and info here in this forum, (as I'm sure you've noticed.) There are some good ebooks out there on the topic. Just depends on your experience with AdWords and what you're looking to learn. If I were you I would simply do a search for "AdWords ebook" in google to see some good options, see which one seems to address your experience level.

[dburdon]

OZChris,

the best technique I can recommend is to copy test. Run at least two different ads for each keyword. Analyse your results and gradually refine your copy to improve click thru rate.

CTR is highly important in Adwords as it will allow you to outrank competitors with higher bids.

[ozchris]

Ta so far.

So what are the tools you guys use to analyse the results?

Are you generally happy with the standard Google Adwords reporting capabilities? For most of our sites I think we only have awstats log reporting.

I notice if you want to use Google Analytics it's basically a waiting game - they say to put your name down, and they will occasionally select people from their list. No timeframe mentioned.

You'd think if a site was willing to signup for Adwords they'd guarantee use of Google Analytics.

I've been reading some horror stories this week about expanded broad match results occurring this year. So you get the pros and cons of broad match as a traffic research tool versus potentially expensive untargetted traffic, even with negative words used. Scary.

[kgun]

I reccomend the following book:

"Winning Results with Google AdWords" by Andrew Goodman .

[bbcarter]

I agree that Andrew Goodman's book was good.

Perry Marshall's audio stuff is good too.

When I finally thought about getting the 'qualified' status, I already had the volume and lots of experience...

I found the learning center too overwhelming- would be nice if you could buy a print copy of it in book format!

What I did was take the test and had the learning center open in another window... open book test :-)

It was educational too- some features of AdWords I hadn't used came up.

[jordanmcclements]

I recently passed the adwords professional exam also...

If you spend a few days revising in the learning centre, and you have some experience already (which you need to have to take the test anyway) - then you should have no problems passing!