Progress/Two Exams This Weekend

The new sitelinks did not help. My high point was last Saturday, as you can see from the pictures below. However, it has only been two days so I will just wait to see how things turn out next week.  With this you have to be patient in order to make progress. I am going to go on Google Adwords help in order to get some good tips to increase my CTR.

 This weekend I am going to take both exams for my certification. The advanced search advertising certification is just going to be for practice, but the Adwords Fundamental exam I am going to pass this time. I am going to have to study for five hours this weekend in order to finally pass the exam. I will be studying a lot this week, but it will be worth it to try the certification. It is a good life again, there will be a lot of challenges for work (or life in general) but you cannot give up no many how many failure you face. You only truly fail when you give up when it becomes too hard.

Exam Progress/Site Link

This time I got a 70 on the exam. I was ten points away from passing. I will keep on improving my study habits in order to pass. One thing I am going to have to do now is study for the AdWords Fundamental Exam and the Search Advertising Exam Simultaneously.  I will have a lot of studying to do to pass both of these exams.

I am trying a new method increase my click through rate. With the suggestion of my Search Engine Marketing class, I am adding sitelink extensions. I am using these sitelink extensions to provide information, “About Us”, “Domestic Animal Bios”, and Exotic Animal Bios. I am also using a call to action for on my extensions, “Support the Sanctuary”. I am hoping these will increase my click through rate. In the meantime, here is a screen shot of my click through rate for the past two weeks, given I did not do a blog post last week as it was my spring break.

Exam result/Ad Group Experiment

For those of you following my blog post, you are probably waiting to hear whether or not I passed the AdWords Fundamental exam. Unfortunately I did not. I did better, but still did not pass. My error was using flashcards for an exam that was mostly concept based. What I will do this time to pass is print out the study guide, read it, and book note it in order to prepare myself for this exam. The other exam I will need to take is the Search Advertising Exam. I will have to study both at once in order to pass them both by the end of the course. I will have a lot of studying to do.

The same thing is still happening with my campaign. The ad group for Tiger Sanctuary is still doing decent, but the one for Midnight the Tiger is not. This will be my experiment just for this week, but I will delete the Midnight ad group to see how my campaign does without it. Below is a picture of my CTR within the last two days. 

Ad Group Contrast

For those of you who read last week's blog. I did not end up taking the AdWords Fundamental exam. I ended up having a lot of homework that I did not study as much as I would have liked to. Therefore, I decided to take it this upcoming weekend, when I will be a little bit more prepared studying wise. So today I will be talking about an interesting discovery with my AdWords campaign. So as you may recall, I had recently added a second ad group based on my most successful key word, “Tiger sanctuary”.  So I had two ad groups, one for the tiger I am specifically advertising, Midnight, and one for the tiger sanctuary itself. The one for the tiger sanctuary has doing way better than the one for Midnight. Midnight is in fact getting a 0.00% CTR. If you look at the two images below, you will see a huge contrast.  The one above is the CTR score for the tiger sanctuary ad group, where as the one below is the CTR score for the Midnight ad group.

As for what I am going to do about this information. I am going to try an experiment for this week. I am going to delete the Midnight ad group, to see if that improves my overall campaign. I will add “Midnight the tiger” for one of my keywords in my tiger sanctuary ad group as to not leave out the tiger I am trying to advertise.  We will see how this goes and I will keep you blog readers updated for next week.