Other Areas of Interest

Invalid Clicks

What are Invalid Clicks, and How Does Google Handle Them?

An invalid click is when someone clicks on your advertisement more than once, and Google bills you for both clicks. An invalid click can also be caused by a robot, internet spider, or a person that repeatedly clicks on your text advertisement. I personally don’t see why people think it hurts their competitors to click on their text advertisement multiple times, because all it does is help them. When they click on a text advertisement you will only be billed once and it helps increase your CTR.

So what does Google do to help prevent invalid clicks? First off, Google takes invalid clicks very seriously (they’ve been sued over it before) and Google currently has a specific team of employees whose only job is to monitor and prevent invalid clicks. If you receive an invalid click, Google will refund you the money. In fact, you can see how many invalid clicks you’ve gotten by running a report in your account and in the report settings, just specify that you would like to see invalid clicks.

For more information on invalid clicks, I recommend watching the following video by Google.

Google Video - What Are Invalid Clicks?

Some Common Misconceptions About Google

Here are some of the things that you may have heard that may or may not be true…

1. People have paid $200.00 per click for certain high traffic keywords

False: The maximum you can ever pay for a single keyword is $50.00 per click, most of the people who bid this high just do so to ensure a number one position and hardly ever pay this amount per click.

2. Someone can get away with small violations on their Google AdWords campaign. Google is so big, no one will notice.

False: Not only will Google notice, but it won’t take very long for them to notice, and if you don’t fix the violation or if it is serious enough they will ban you.

3. You can just click on your own advertisement multiple times or have someone else do the same thing to help boost you CTR.

False: If you click on your advertisement multiple times to try to cheat Google, Google will notice. They even have specialized teams and computer programs which continually monitor the clicks received and depending on how many times you did it, they will ban you. If you have someone else try to click on your Advertisement multiple times, Google will stop recording the amount of times they click on it so your CTR will not be affected.

4. You can hurt your competitor by clicking on their advertisement multiple times to raise the amount of money they spend.

False: Again, Google will stop counting the amount of times you click on their advertisement. And for the short number of times you do, it will raise their CTR for that keyword.

Unlimited AdWords Vouchers…

Many people are trying to cut advertising costs to increase their profits with PPC advertising. Google is a little bit harder to do this with, but still people attempt to get free advertising from them. As you may already know, Google (as well as many other PPC search engines) gives free advertising vouchers out to attract business and new customers. These advertising vouchers will give you $25-$100 in free advertising for your Google AdWords account. The only catch is that your account has to be new and can’t be over two weeks old.

You may have heard of people receiving Unlimited AdWords Vouchers on Google. If you have, here is what they are doing. First they set up a new Google account and then apply the advertising voucher to it, then they advertise until their free advertising credits have been spent and they create another Google account and do the same thing there. The idea is that you keep doing this to get infinite advertising on Google for free.

Here’s the problem with doing this. Google is very intolerant of people trying to cheat them, and Google also closely monitors who uses free advertising credits. If you use this technique, Google will catch you and they will ban you for life. This means you will never be able to advertise on Google again. My guess is that this technique used to work, but now it’s very risky to try it.

You will see people trying to sell books and vouchers that claim you can get free advertising for life. If you see any of them, this is what they’re talking about. They will try to convince you that it’s perfectly safe and you won’t get caught, but you will.

Google AdSense…

A lot of people get Google AdWords and Google AdSense confused with each other. I have even seen reviews for Google Money Pro online telling how it was a good Google AdSense book. You should know what Google AdWords is by now if you have read this far into the guide, but you may or may not know what Google AdSense is.

Google AdSense is a program that Google has where they pay webpage and website owners to put Google AdWords advertisements on their website. Each time someone clicks on the Google AdWords advertisements, the owner of the webpage will get paid a few cents. This is where a majority of the traffic in contextual advertising comes from.

If you’re interested in learning more information about Google AdSense, go to the following website:

https://www.google.com/adsense/

Profitable Vs Unprofitable

Some of you may think that you can spot out a profitable campaign fairly easily, but just to make sure I’m going to show you what to look for in a profitable campaign.

Profitable Campaigns/AdGroups contain the following:

• Low minimum bids
  
• High click through rates
  
• A lot of clicks from the search network
• A lot of clicks from the content network
• High quality scores

Of course you will also need to watch your sales rates and refund rates.

Unprofitable campaigns contain just the opposite of the profitable campaigns which include:

• High bids
• Inactive for search keywords
• Very little clicks from the search network
• Low amounts of clicks from the content network
• Low quality score
• Very few sales with high refunds

Spreadsheets & Worksheets

Many people have asked me what I do to manage my Google accounts performance and my affiliate sales. The short answer is that I use excel worksheets because I haven’t found anything that can really organize and show me what campaigns and ClickBank products are performing the best. So, I’m including a link below that you can download these spreadsheets to your computer so you too can use them.

Click Here to Download These Spreadsheets

Google’s Contact Information

Some of you may have noticed that it can be difficult to get support from Google. In Google AdWords, Google only gives you the option of emailing them to get support or help, and most of their email replies seem robotic and very vague.

So what’s the best way to contact Google AdWords?

You should call them! Google doesn’t give out this phone number…for some unknown reason, but their phone support is above excellent. Anyway, if you ever hear people talk about having a personal Google Rep, this is the phone number they are talking about:

1-866-2-Google

Google Chat

Another great way to contact Google is to chat with a Google Agent online. They only display the chat option if there’s an agent available so it can be a bit tricky to get it to work well. The best (and most consistent) way to do this is by using the following technique.

• Login to your Google Account and click on the “Contact Us” link at the top of the page.
• Select “Other” as the contact reason and click “Continue”
• Then select “Help Improving Ad Performance” and click “Continue”
• If there’s a chat representative available you will be given the option of Chatting with an AdWords specialist. If not, try again and make sure that you’re still within their business hours which are 7am to 7pm Monday - Thursday and 7 am to 6 pm on Friday. The times are on PST(US)

Or you can simply go to the following website address, although they don’t always display their chat invitation here: http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=17