Fundamentals Exam Study Guide

• 6 main tabs in Adwords account:

o Home – contains account snapshot page
o Campaigns – create and edit campaigns, ads, keywords, and
display network placement
 All critical account alerts related to payment problems,
pending budget end date, credit and bank card
expirations, ad disapprovals are listed here
o Opportunities – location for keyword and budget optimization
ideas across your account
o Reporting – track the success of the ads, keywords and
campaigns
o Billing
o My account – control personal info
• Actual CPC = (ad rank to beat / Quality Score) + 0.01
• Ad creation marketplace – offers a selection of industry
professionals who can provide script writing, editing, production,
and voice over talent at an affordable package cost
• Ad group guidelines & policies:
o Clearly and accurately represent your site
o Emphasize the unique benefits of your product or service
• Ad rank – calculated by (display network bid X quality score)
o Increasing max CPC will improve the position of ad
• Ad rotation – determines how often Google delivers the active ads in
relation to one another with an ad group
o Optimize – system with favor ads that have a combination of a
high CTR and quality score
o Rotate – each ad will enter the ad auction an approximate
equal # of times
• Ad scheduling – a tool for adjusting your bids for different times of
the day or days of the week
o Based on account time zone
• Ad text report – view stats on how specific types of ad variations are
performing
• Adwords Application Programming Interface – lets developers build
applications that interact directly with the Adwords server
o Designed for developers representing large, tech savvy
advertisers and 3rd parties who want to automate reporting or
campaign management
• Adwords discounter – a feature that automatically reduces your
actual CPC so that you pay the lowest price possible for your ad’s
position on the page
• Adwords image ads – graphical ads that can be static or animated
 o Ads appear on select display network sites which have opted
in to image ads programs
o These ads combine 2 powerful features
 Graphics
 Proven Adwords targeting technology
• Adwords offers 2 ways to trigger ads to appear:
o Keyword targeting – advertisers select keyword that can
trigger their ads to appear on Google search pages and on the
Google display network
 Broad match – allows ad to show on similar phrases and
relevant variations of the keyword
 Phrase match – allows ad to show for searches that
include the exact phrase of the keyword
 Exact match – allows ad to show for searches that
match the exact phrase exclusively
 Negative match – eliminates searched phrases you
don’t want ad to appear for
 Embedded match – prevent ad from appearing in
relation to certain phrase or exact match
o Placement targeting – lets advertisers choose individual sites
in the Google display network where they’d like their ads to
appear
 Can be an entire website, or it can be a subset of page
or ad units on a site
• Automatic placement - Placements in the Display
Network that Google finds for you based on cues
(such as keywords) in your ad group
• Managed placement - ad placements on specific
sites in the Display Network that you single out to
target
• Excluded placement
• Adwords preview tool – view your ads as they would appear on a
regular Google search result page for any location, without accruing
extra impressions
• Alerts – create custom alerts so you are automatically notified when
certain behaviors and/or changes occur within campaigns and ad
groups
o Alerts about increases or decreases in specific metrics
o Alerts about metrics hat have reached a certain threshold you
set

• Benefits of Adwords:
o Relevance – the ability to precisely target ads to users based
on their interest, as well as a # of other factors like location,
 language, and demographic
o Reach – the opportunity to capture any segment of that broad
worldwide audience that’s actively looking for products,
services, information, and websites
o ROI – [(Revenue – Cost) / Cost] * 100
• Best practices for text ads:
o Choose the best destination URL
o Test multiple ads
o Use an accurate display URL
o Monitor your ads’ performance
• Bid – the amount your willing to pay per click, per thousand
impressions or per acquisition
• Bidding options:
o Cost per click – pay only when someone clicks on your ad
 Recommended if you’re mostly interested in getting
traffic to your site
o Cost per thousand impression – pay every thousand times
your ad appears
 Recommended if you’re mostly interested in branding
and getting ad visibility
 Only if you are using the display network
o Conversion optimizer – specify a max cost per acquisition
(CPA) for each ad group
 Must meet the following requirements to use
• Conversion tracking must be enabled
• Campaign must have received at least 15
conversions in the last 30 days
• Campaign must have been receiving conversions
at a similar rate for at least a few days
• Branding – main reason for advertising online is to raise awareness
and visibility of your product, service, or cause
o You want to aim to place ads in front of as many people as
possible within your target audience

• Click Through Rate (CTR) = (# of clicks your ad received) / (# of

impressions)
o Optimization should focus on creating more relevant and
compelling ads to help drive more targeted traffic
• Contextual targeting – your keywords are used to place your ads
next to content that matches your ads
• Contextually targeted ads:
o Uses CPC bidding, quality score is based on
 The historical CTR of the ad
 The relevance of the ads and keywords in the ad group
  The quality of landing page
o Uses CPM bidding, quality score is based on
 Quality of landing page
• Conversion optimizer – use this tool if your campaign focuses on
conversions and you want to optimize your bids on a case by case
basis
• Conversion tracking – allows you to identify the ads that bring you
customers
o data to get more conversions at a lower cost
• Cost-per-thousand impression (CPM) – pay per impression
• Country/territory targeting – use when you offer services or
products to users in one or more countries or territories
• Customized targeting – best suited for advertisers with an audience
in very specific areas
o Benefit is that it doesn’t limit you to the cities and regions
offered by the region/city targeting
o When setting up customized targeting you have 3 options:
 Enter a physical address
 Select a point on the map
 Multi-point – click 3 or more points on an interactive
map to outline the advertising region of your choice
• Daily budget – amount you’re willing to spend on a specific
campaign each day
o When budget is reached your ads will typically stop showing
for that day
• Demographic bidding – a tool for targeting ads to specific groups of
customers visiting sites in the display network Direct response -
you’d like a user to perform an action after clicking through your ad
to your website
• Device platform targeting – a campaign setting feature that allows
you target your text and image ads to one of the following:
o Desktops and laptops
o iPhones and similar mobile devices that use full HTML
browsers
• Double-byte characters – characters used in many east Asian
languages

• Excluding placements from display network targeting:

o Most exclusions apply only to the display network
o You may exclude up to 5,000 sites in each campaign
o Exclusion tool: “Sites Tab”, “Topic Tab”, “Page Tab”
The "Sites" Tab
Use this tab to prevent your ads from showing on individual webpages.
This tab will be selected for you by default.
 In the available field, list the URLs of any webpages that you don't
want showing your ads. You may enter top-level domains, first-level
subdomains, and domains with a single directory name. Learn more
about your formatting options.
The "Topics" Tab
Use this tab to prevent your ads from showing on groups of webpages
in the Google Display Network that could potentially be viewed as
sensitive.
1. Review the topics available for exclusion.
2. Familiarize yourself with the following points about topic exclusion:
• Excluding a topic can significantly reduce traffic to your campaign. You
can see how much traffic your ads have received on pages in these
topics by viewing the table in the Topics tab.
• Our system may identify several topics on a single page. By excluding
a topic, you may exclude webpages that contain material relevant to
your product or service.
• All pages in the Display Network are required to comply with Google's
AdSense policies, which prohibit pornography, violence, and other
potentially inappropriate content. Several levels of automated and
manual review are in place to help ensure that the pages in the Display
Network don't violate these policies.
• This tab supports the following languages: Chinese, Dutch, English,
French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish. Please
don't use this tab if your campaign targets an unsupported language.
3. Check any topics that you'd like to prevent from showing your ads.
Important note: While webpages are categorized under these topics to
the best of our technology's ability, excluding a topic does not
guarantee that you have excluded every related webpage. If you see
that your ad has shown on an undesired webpage, please exclude that
page using the Sites tab.
The "Page Types" Tab
Use this tab to prevent your ads from showing on certain page types.
1. Review the page types available for exclusion.
2. Familiarize yourself with the following points about page type exclusion:
• Excluding a page type can significantly reduce traffic to your
campaign. You can see how much traffic your ads have received on
pages in these categories by viewing the table on the Page Types
tab.
• Our system is optimized to show ads on relevant Display Network
pages. By excluding a page type, you may exclude webpages that
contain material relevant to your product or service.
• All pages in the Display Network are required to comply with Google's
AdSense policies, which prohibit pornography, violence, and other
potentially inappropriate content. Several levels of automated and
manual review are in place to help ensure that the pages in the Display
Network, even ones with frequently changing content, don't violate
these policies.
• The User-generated content section of this tab supports the
following languages: Dutch, English, French, German, Italian,
Portuguese, and Spanish. Please don't make exclusions in this section
 if your campaign targets an unsupported language. (The Network
types section supports all languages.)
3. Check any page types that you'd like to prevent from showing your ads.

• First Bid Estimate - approximates the cost-per-click (CPC) bid

needed for your ad to reach the first page of Google search results
when a search query exactly matches your keyword

• General order of bids (highest to lowest):

o Individual placement bids
o Ad group managed placement bids
o Ad group display network bids
o Ad group default bid
• Google analytics – free tool that gives you detailed data on your
site, including how users found your site, what route they used to
explore it, and at what point they left
• Google display network – placing ads on nearly any type of website
or page a user might browse, such as news, blogs, reviews,
entertainment, online magazines, and marketplaces
o Reaches over 70% of unique internet users in more than 20
languages and over 100 countries
• Google search network – includes Google search pages, search
sites, and properties that display search results pages, suck as
Google product search and EarthLink

• Hourly report – will be able to see what hours of the day ads
received the most amount of traffic
• How keywords and managed placements work together:
o Step 1 – keywords always do their work first
o Step 2 – managed placements further control where your ads
may appear

• Image ad – a graphical ad, which can be static or animated, that

runs on the Google display network. AKA display ad
• Image ad guidelines:
o Static images can be formatted in .gif, .jpg, and .png
 They can be the following sizes:
• 250 X 250
• 200 X 200
• 468 X 60
• 728 X 90
• 300 X 250
• 336 X 280
 • 120 X 600
• 160 X 600
o Animated image ads can be formatted in .gif or flash
 Size limited to 50 kb
• Impression – the number of times an ad is displayed in Google or
the Google network
o If your not getting many impressions, try increasing your bid
to improve your visibility
• Improve landing page quality:
o Relevant and original content
o Transparency – site should be explicit in 3 areas
 Business info
 Site’s interaction with visitor’s computer
 Personal info
o Navigability
• Improve quality score:
o Create tightly themed ad groups
o Target appropriate locations and languages
o Write descriptive ads
o Evaluate your site design

• Keep in mind for mobile ad campaign settings:

o Create new, mobile ads only campaigns
o Be sure to target a locations where mobile ads are available
o Be careful when targeting regions smaller than a country
• Keyword – the terms or phrases you want to prompt your ad to
appear
o If a keyword underperforms, its quality score will decrease
and it may become ineligible to trigger your ads for certain
search queries at its current CPC bid
• Keyword best practices:
o Group your keyword list into similar items, such as product
line
o Broader matching tend to give more visibility, but accrue
higher costs
o Narrower matching tend to give fewer clicks and lower costs
o Negative keywords work well in most cases when term
doesn’t apply to business
o Keep campaign settings in mind
o Refine keyword list
 Keep specific keywords that relate best to product or
service
 Keep keyword lists small and manageable
  2 – 3 word phrases generally work best
• Keyword creation involves 5 steps:
o Build a keyword list
o Group your keywords by theme
o Set appropriate match types for each keyword
o Remove unnecessary keywords
o Test run the campaign
• Keyword insertion – an advanced feature that can help make your
ad more relevant to a diverse audience
o To use this, lace a short piece of code into your ad text
• Keyword optimization strategies:
o When choosing keywords, think like a customer
o Choose specific keywords that relate to your business, ad
group, and landing page
o Include variations
o Take advantage of keyword matching options
o Use unique keyword URLs
• Keyword report – view stats on how keywords are performing across
all campaigns, in selected campaigns and in selected ad groups
• Keyword tool – use this tool to brainstorm keyword lists and find
negative keywords

• Landing page quality – influenced by the usefulness and relevance

of information provided on the page, ease of navigation, load time,
how many links are on the page
• Language targeting – target up to 40 different languages
• Levels of Adwords accounts:
o Administrative – highest level of access. Users can view, edit,
and manage any part of an account and its campaigns
o Standard – users have almost the same access as admin.
Except users cannot invite others to share access
o Read only – users can view and run reports and browse the
campaigns and opportunities tabs
o Email only – lowest level. Only receive account alerts and
other notifications
• Location targeting – target any combination of countries, territories,
regions, cities, and customized areas
o Google considers the domain being used
o Google analyzes the search term the user submits
o Google determines the user’s general location based on IP
addresses

• Managed placements – specific websites placements in the display

network that you deliberately choose to target
 o Placement management – you’ve opted to run ads on the
display network but only on relevant pages
o Bid management – running ads across the entire display
network
o 3 main ways to add managed placements
 Manually add managed placements
 Copy from automatic placements
 Use the placement tool
• Maximum cost per click – the highest amount you are willing to pay
for a click on your ad
• My Client Center (MCC) – ideal for larger advertisers with more than
one account and for 3rd party agencies
• Mobile ads – eligible to show regardless of what device platform
you’ve chosen in your campaign
• Mobile ad guideline:
o Link policy - destination site must be written in a supported
mobile markup language
o Size – WAP mobile text ads contain 2 lines of text, with a limit
of 12 or 18 characters per line

• Opportunities tabs – when looking for a fast, effective way to find

new keyword ideas or recommended budget
• Optimize ads for branding:
o Try different ad formats
o Use capitalization to your advantage
• Optimize ads for CTR:
o Be descriptive
o Include deals and benefits
o Match your keywords as closely as possible
o Consider keyword insertion
• Optimize ads for ROI:
o Define a clear call to action
o Relate ads to their landing page
o Filter out unqualified clicks
• Optimize keywords for better CTR – you want to delete keywords
with high impression counts by low numbers of click throughs
• Optimizing campaigns and ad groups:
o Know your goals
o Measure the results
o Experiment and adapt
• Optimization – the process of adjusting parts of your account as well
as your website to improve the quality and performance of ads
o Can involve ad text improvements, new keywords, changes to
keyword settings, strategic changes to bids, better
 organization within campaign, and changes to ad targeting
options
• Optimization can help achieve:
o More clicks and traffic to site
o Higher profits and improved ROI
o Lower costs
o Ability to accomplish advertising goals
• Optimization strategies for automatic placement:
o Use relevant keywords
o Group keyword by theme
o Write ads that match your keywords
• Optimization strategies for managed placement:
o Use only relevant placement
o Delete poorly performing placement
o Use sites that are compatible with your ad
o Use the most effective bidding strategy
o Experiment with different bids
o Assign destination URLs
o Group your placements by theme
o Combine with keywords
• Optimization tools:
o Targeting tools
 Keyword tool
 Placement tool
 Traffic estimator
 Search terms report and search query performance
report
o Optimization tools
 Opportunities tab
 Website optimizer
 Conversion optimizer
o Tracking tools
 Google analytics
 Conversion tracking
 Account stats on campaign tab
• Organizing your account, keep in mind:
o Organize your campaigns by topic
o Target the right languages and locations
o Create highly specific ad groups
o Avoid duplicate keywords across ad groups

• Page rank – the measure of the importance of a page based on the

incoming links from the other pages
 o Max CPC X Quality Score
• Pay-per-click (PPC) – pay only when a user clicks on ad
• Parked Domain Site - an undeveloped webpage belonging to a
domain name registrar or domain name holder
• Placement – another way for you to control where your ad appears
• Placement performance report – shows performance stats for your
ads on specific domains and URLs in the display network
• Placement targeted ads:
o Uses CPC bidding, quality score is based on
 The historical CTR of the ad
 The quality of landing page
o Uses CPM bidding, quality score is based on
 Quality of landing page
• Placement tool – good keyword list will provide sufficient targeting
• Position preference – a too for specifying in which position you’d like
ad to appear
o A bidding feature that gives sophisticated advertisers more
control over the position of ads
o Helps achieve your desired ad position in 2 ways:
 It attempts to show ad only when the ad rank has
placed ad in the positions you select
 If the ad rank placed the ad in a higher spot, it will
discount your max CPC

• Quality score – ad rank which is a combination of your bid and a

relevancy metric
o Calculated every time your keyword matches a search query
o A formula that varies based on your bid type, where your ad is
showing, and targeting type
o Measures relevancy, a high score means that your ads will
appear in a higher position and at a lower CPC
o The higher your quality score, the higher your ad will be
ranked and the lower your costs will be
o Based on your keywords CTR, relevance of your ad text,
keyword, and landing page
• Query – a word or phrase which displays a set of results that are
relevant to the query

• Ranking on the display network – ads are ranked based on ad group

default bid, ad’s past performance, and landing page quality
• Ranking on the search network – ads are ranked based on a
combination of the matched keyword’s CPC and quality score
• Reasons you can’t see your ad:
o No billing info
 o Ad approval status
o Daily budget
o Geo-targeting
o Language targeting
o Campaign ad scheduling
• Receive clicks from outside targeted locations:
o A user’s IP address is mapped outside their actual location
o A user outside your targeted area specifically searches for
something Google knows is in your target area
o Your target area may be larger than you intended
o You have targeted the country/territory level
• Recommended daily budget – includes a detailed budget analysis of
your campaign performance, typically from the past 15 days
• Region/city targeting – best used by advertisers whose audience is
concentrated in defined areas
o Capture a smaller population, segment and receive more
qualified clicks
o To monitor ad performance, there are 2 options:
 Run a geographic performance report
 Link account to Google analytics
• Restrictions/tip for naming image ads:
o Don’t exceed 50 characters
o Include an image description
o Include the campaign or ad group name
• Rich media ads – include video ads, flash animated ads, and ads
that mix text and animated content and designs to more actively
engage a web user
o Video – create in stream or click to play ads using their unique
templates
o Animation/image – select multiple interactive templates that
allow you to showcase images or set unique destination URLs
per image
• Rich media display ad guideline:
o Copyright – you much have full legal rights or an authorized
license to distribute the content on ad
o Advertising policy
o Privacy – many NOT use ads to collect personally identifying
user info
• ROI – measure of the profits you have made from your advertising,
compared to how much you’ve spent on advertising
o To optimize, aim for high quality scores

• Search engine marketing (SEM) – the process of promoting and

marketing a website through paid listings (ads) on search engines
• Search engine optimization (SEO) – involves building new websites,
or changing existing websites, so that they rank highly in a search
engine’s organic listings when users search n terms that are related
to the site’s content
• Search targeting – applies to keyword-targeted ads shown on
Google search result pages and on sites in the search network
• Setting CPC or CPM bidding, consider:
o The value of a click
o Your daily budget
• Smart pricing – a feature that automatically reduces the price
advertisers pay for clicks if the data shows that a click from a
display network page is less likely to result in a conversion

• Text ads generally contain the following element:

o Headlines – 25 characters
o Description – 2 lines, 35 characters each
o Display URL – 35 characters
o Destination URL – up to 1024 characters
• Text ad guidelines and policies:
o Editorial and format
 Character limit
 Prices, discounts, and free offers
 Punctuation and symbol
o Content
o Links - destination URL must be accurate
• Things to keep in mind when creating ad groups:
o Create simple, enticing ads
o Include price and promotions
o Use a strong call to action
o Include one of your keywords in your ad text
o Choose the best destination URL
o Test multiple ads in each ad group
• Things to keep in mind when designing video campaign:
o Placement and keyword targeting
o Language and location targeting
 Target your video ads internationally, nationally, or
locally
o Pricing
 Choose CPC or CPM
• Traffic estimator – find keyword traffic and cost estimates to identify
potential keywords to add or to optimize your keyword bids
• Types of Adwords budgets:
o Standard delivery – spread ad impressions across the day
 o Accelerated delivery – display your ad as often as possible
until daily budget is reached

• Video content – the video you create should be direct and engaging

• Website optimizer – free tool that lets you test different versions of
your site
• Writing Text ads:
o Create simple, enticing ads
o Include price and promotions
o Use a strong call to action
o Include one of your keywords in your ad text
• Both Google display and search network targets 38 languages and
250 countries. Reaches 80% of all internet users