Is Google AdWords Certification Needed?
For those of you who don’t know AdWords is an advertising platform that allows you to reach customers by bidding on specific keywords or phrases customers are likely to type into Google’s search engine… this gives businesses the opportunity to drive highly targeted traffic to their websites and make more money… but is a Google AdWords certification needed?
Well… picture someone selling ‘dog training’ products or services and is looking for a way to reach customers online… they write a couple of ads, post them on Google and within minutes they can get highly targeted traffic to their website by showing their ads whenever someone types keywords into Google related to dog training such as ‘how to train dog’, ‘teach dog new tricks’, etc…
… now Google AdWords also has a feature called the display network, which allows you to advertise on websites, thta have opted to display Google Ads…
… basically the advertiser targets websites related to their topic, like dog websites, and Google shows ads in those websites…
The way Google charges to advertise with these various programs varies. The advertiser can choose to pay per click or they can pay per thousand impressions.
There are more advanced features like paying per action, which is known as cost per action or CPA…
So if you can begin to see, the concept of marketing with Google AdWords sounds simple, but if you really want to use all the features it has to offer, then you definitely need to spend some time getting to know what you can do to reach your customers…
In today’s world, I don’t see the need for a certification…
What is most important is to understand YOUR customer… who are you selling to? what do they want? what are they searching for?…
See, the thing is that it’s easy to see how someone going into Google and typing in ‘how to play golf’ is looking to learn exactly what the phrase says ‘how to play golf’… so you can write up an ad and offer to teach the searcher how to play golf…
But because that is too easy to see, many advertisers will bid on the keyword and drive the price up…
On the other hand, few marketers truly understand their customers and take advantage of the display network. A chiropractor once figured that over half his clients played golf and he went out and targeted golf related websites and displayed an ad that had to do with back pain and golf… he was therefore able to tap into a source of traffic no other chiropractor was getting because every other chiropractor was bidding on ‘chiropractor’ related terms instead of using the display network and thinking of all the places their customers would hang out…
Learning the difference between the search and the display network takes a day or two by just playing around without having to get a certification… but learning how to reach the right audience, takes marketing know-how and street smarts salesmanship, which is often learned with direct response marketing training…
That’s my opinion, but I would love to hear from anyone who has gone through a Google AdWords certification program or is looking for one, to tell me the pros if any?
