Most people want to know how to find the amount of traffic and the amount of money their competitors are getting and spending in advertising on Google. Unfortunately, there is no 100% guaranteed way to do this, but is a general way that you can use to get a good idea.

The First Step is to use Google’s traffic estimator tool (this is different from their keyword tool) to see how much traffic your competitor is getting for the keywords they are using. You do need to know the keywords they are using so you can either search for similar keywords or use a product like SpyFu. Once you have some keywords go to Click Here and enter the appropriate information and search to see the traffic levels for those keywords.

The Second Step is to find what they’re paying for their text ad. Google gives each website domain a Quality Score and most of the time that quality score stays with that domain regardless of the account it’s advertised in. This means that if you create the same exact text advertisement as this person and use the same keywords, you should have a similar quality score. So create a new campaign (you can call it “Test”) and create a new AdGroup. In the text ad section, enter the same exact text ad they use (definitely make sure the destination URL is the same) and then at the keyword section enter the keywords you found. Then Google will take you to the traffic estimate page. You don’t want to go past this page since you’re not going to run the advertisement yourself (you don’t want to give them free traffic). On this traffic estimate page, enter the max bid at $0.05 and see how many of their keywords are active and at what price they need to raise their keywords to activate them. Doing this will give you their minimum required bid on Google, so there’s your Min Bid. Then increase your bid until all the keywords are active (remember we are still on the estimated traffic page and are not activating this AdGroup), this will give you their max bid. When you’re done you will have the bid ranges and traffic estimates for that competitor. Make sure to click on the “Cancel” or “Back” button to prevent Google from actually creating that AdGroup.

I’m currently doing a lot of work and experiments with Google’s Quality score. So the next couple posts I’ll make will probably be about Google’s Quality score. I was reading an ewhisper post which contained a chart the explained the quality score rankings associated with your account and the landing page. Below is a chart based off of the one on ewhisper, but it contains my data that will better explain problems and explanations with your Quality Score and it’s bid:

Min Bid - The minimum bid Google AdWords requires you to pay per click to have an active advertisement.
Possible Improvement - The chances that you can improve your minimum bid making it lower.
Account Issue - The chances that the reason your minimum bid is too high is because of your Google AdWords account organization (AdGroups, Text Ads, Keywords, etc).
Landing Page Issue - The chances that the reason yoru minimum bid is too high is because of the landing page you’re using.

I know, I know…you have just submitted an advertisement to Google and you want to see if it’s being displayed so you search for it. Everyone does this, but if you’re still doing it you should stop because you don’t want to interfere with your advertisement’s performance.

Think of it, each time you search for your advertisement, that’s another impression without a click. Yeah, it probably won’t do much, but we all know that with Google every bit counts. Also, in case you don’t know yet…don’t ever click on your own text advertisement. Doing this will 100% damage your account. Google knows who you are by your IP address and a few other things and if their computers track that you clicked on your own text advertisement they will assume you’re attempting to increase your CTR and they may ban you for it. It probably won’t happen if you click on it one or two times, but I wouldn’t recommend doing it at all.

Anyway, since I’ve been receiving emails lately about people trying to find their text advertisements on Google, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to give you access to Google’s Advertiser Search page.

The Advertiser Search page allows you to search for your advertisements as much as you want without it affecting your advertising performance. Google wasn’t too clear on if clicking on your ad on the Advertiser Search page was discouraged, but I don’t think it would hurt your account since this page was specifically built for advertisers. Then again, you never know.

Here’s the address of their advertiser search page:

https://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool

Go there and search for your text ads to see their ranking, position, and to find who your competitors are.

Recently it’s been a popular email to receive that you can get ads on Google AdWords for free. Since many people have been emailing me asking me about this, I decided to write a small post about it.

The truth is that unless Google gives you a credit or a free advertising voucher (they don’t freely hand these out), there is no way for you to get Google Ads for free. All the products and ebooks that tell you that they receive Google Ads for free are a little inaccurate.

Basically, here’s how these products tell you to get Google Ads for free…

First off, you have to own the website you’re advertising otherwise this doesn’t work at all. If you own a website, but can’t update specific sections of the website you’re advertising this won’t work either.

Secondly, they don’t tell you how to prevent Google from charging you for your advertisements on AdWords. You still pay Google every penny for your advertising costs.

Since you now know this, you’re probably wondering “how do they get Google Ads for free?”. Basically, their theory is that if you sell enough advertising on your website by displaying banners, text advertisements, links, etc. you will make enough money from those advertisements to offset your advertising costs on Google.

It will work, but their technique is a little vague on their website. Using this theory I can advertise Google Money Pro as “Get Google Ads Free” and just say something like “you will get Google Ads free by making enough money by selling products to cover your Google fees”.

The current real ways to get free Google advertising are either by getting a Google coupon from Google themselves, Getting a Google Coupon from a Google Advertising Professional, or by getting an AdWords Credit from Google if they overcharge your account for fraudulent clicks.

More and more people seem to be producing their own products promising success online. Although I’m sure that some of these products are genuine a lot of them are most likely scams or just people trying to slap stuff together without actually knowing how to succeed online.

A good way to stop these out is see if they offer proof screenshots. First off, you should know that proof screenshots can easily be edited to look like they are genuine so when examining the validity of these products you should take a close look at their proof pictures.

Here’s what you should do to see if the proof pictures have been edited:

• See if the sales figures added together match the total amount displayed (if not, see if there’s an explanation).
• Make sure the dates are all accurate.
• If it’s a proof check, make sure the dollar amount equals what is written on the check.
• See if the picture is blurry, unclear, or of poor quality.
  Also, if they are selling a product that claims to show you how to make money every single day through a steady and reliable traffic source, then their proof pictures should show steady and consistent daily income levels. If there are two days with $300 in sales and then one day with $2,400 in sales there’s a 99% chance that person send an email blast telling people to purchase their product.

  Usually, if the website or service offers a video proof of their income level then you should know that it’s valid and accurate.

  Here is an example of a fake proof picture as well as a proof picture displaying an email lauch.

Recently it was announced that people in the USA have changed their internet search habits from using three word searches to four word searches. It was also concluded that people who use four-word keywords to search for products are more likely to purchase goods or services rather than people searching with one, two, or three-keyword searches.

This can be both good news to some and bad news for others. It’s good news for those who are targeting traffic towards those four word keywords as those keywords are probably mostly left unadvertised on. It’s bad news for people who are using search engine optimization to receive traffic because websites can usually only target one to three different search phrases and be in the first page listings for organic search results.

This also just helps prove that long tail keywords are the way to advertise because there is less competition, lower advertising costs, and higher conversions. If only there was a way to find all of them we would all be set for life .

A lot of people have been asking me how Google’s new URL policy will affect them. Seeing as how Google’s URL rules seem a bit jumbled and confusing, I’ll explain it here.

First off, Google has had this rule in place for a while (at least a couple of years), but they haven’t been enforcing it. Basically, Google just wants the display URL to be the same domain as the landing page (for those of you who don’t already know, the landing page is the address of the page your Destination URL takes you to). The best way to explain this is through the following examples:
Accepted Examples:

Display URL: GoogleMoneyPro.com
Destination URL: http://stevenhold.googlemp.hop.clickbank.net
Landing Page: http://www.googlemoneypro.com/cb/index.htm?hop=stevenhold

Display URL: MyWebsite.com
Destination URL: http://www.mywebsite.com
Landing Page: http://www.mywebsite.com

*This examples from Google
Display URL: www.google.com/adwords
Destination URL: www.trackingurl.com/google123
Landing Page: www.google.com

You should notice that in the three examples above, all of the landing page addresses are the same domain as the Display URL.
Unacceptable Examples:

Display URL: GMoneyPro.com
Destination URL: http://stevenhold.googlemp.hop.clickbank.net
Landing Page: http://www.googlemoneypro.com/cb/index.htm?hop=stevenhold

To get the above ad to work you would need to change the display URL to googlemoneypro.com so it will match the Landing Page.

Display URL: www.google.com/adwords
Destination URL: www.trackingurl.com/google123
Landing Page: www.trackingurl.com

To get the above ad to work, you would need to change the display URL to trackingurl.com so it will be the same domain as the landing page.

Display URL: hop.clickbank.net/
Destination URL: http://stevenhold.googlemp.hop.clickbank.net
Landing Page: http://www.googlemoneypro.com/cb/index.htm?hop=stevenhold

To get the above ad to work you would need to change the display URL to googlemoneypro.com.
Keep in mind that this policy only affects new advertisements. It won’t affect any of your old advertisements, unless you make changes to them. Also, Google considers a different sub domain (ex. http://my.reviewsolution.com) to be acceptable as long as the domain name is consistent.

Also remember that the same website address with a different extensions (.com, .org, .net, etc.) will not be acceptable.