Steven Holdaway's Blog » Personal

Google Makes Mistakes Too…

Steven Holdaway — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 13:57:16 +0000

Yesterday morning I noticed that one of my campaigns took a severe dive in Quality Score. This campaign had been running well for nearly three years and had 100-200 keywords that were 10/10 quality score.

So imagine my surprise when I noticed it didn’t receive any traffic over the weekend. When I looked into it I noticed that all of my keywords were a 1/10 quality score. Anyone who’s fairly experienced with Google AdWords will tell you that a 1/10 quality score means your site is breaking one of Google’s policies. Knowing that this site wasn’t breaking any policies (since it had been running for 30+ months without any problems) I contacted Google and they told me someone would review my account.

Normally when you contact Google because of a drop in quality score, they usually send you an email saying “Our review staff has indicated that there is no problem with your account and the drop in quality score is justifiable…”. But this time, I got a different response:

Whoops, Google Made a Mistake

Anyway, when I read the email, two things came to my mind:

Thank goodness I wasn’t out of town.
This site is on a private server that never goes down!?

Luckily, I have an account with Pingdom where they check all my sites every minute each day to make sure they’re not down. So I decided to check the uptime report of that particular website for this month.

Yup, just as I had expected. The website was up 100% of the time, meaning Google simply made a mistake. Oh well, nobody’s perfect.

Quick Vacation – Almost back to work

Steven Holdaway — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 17:57:16 +0000

Over the weekend I took a quick snow skiing vacation to Washington State (USA). After three days of skiing I am not only tired but a bit behind in my work. I’m planning on catching up on all the emails and other things I need to do by tomorrow so if anyone’s sent me an email and hasn’t received a reply yet, it’s because I’m a bit behind .

Passed the AdWords Qualified Individual Exam!

Steven Holdaway — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:21:32 +0000

Well as many of you may already know, I’m a certified Advertising Professional by Google. Unfortunately, to keep this certification, you have to take and re-take an advertising professional’s exam every two years.

This is my third time to take the exam in the past 4 years (as each exam expires after two years). I’m happy to say that not only did I pass, but I did fairly well with a 94% score!

Passed Google's Advertising Exam

For those who don’t know, here are some details about the exam:

It costs $50 to take, and if you fail it, you have to pay $50 again to re-take it
It’s 120 questions
You have 2 hours to complete the test
You take it online, but Google forces you to take it in a “Special Browser” that prevents you from surfing the web, reading files on your computer, or do anything but take the exam (this prevents people from cheating).
The exam covers every aspect of Google AdWords (which is a lot of stuff!)
You have to make 85% or higher to pass! So if you make an 84%, you fail and have to re-take it.

Anyway, I’ve passed the exam the first time I took it every year I’ve taken it…so you can rest assured that I know my stuff!

So long story short, I’m now re-certified as an Advertising Professional for Google for another two years.

Whoohoo – Finished my New Blog

Steven Holdaway — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 16:51:58 +0000

I’ve finally finished my new blog, which i feel will bring me closer to everyone who follows what i do every day. My old blog was so 2004, so i feel this new design should help make it easier for me to not only make more frequent posts, but also keep everyone informed on new products, tips, and strategies for making money online!

Switching All Videos to YouTube

Steven Holdaway — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 21:21:50 +0000

Well, I think I will go with the trend and will put all the videos I have with internet marketing into YouTube format. Not only does this make it easier for me (uses less of my website’s resources), but I feel this will help other people out as well because most people are more familiar with YouTube and it’s easier to make comments.

So expect to see some more videos added to my blog over the next few days. I am having to reconvert them into HD format to keep the quality high (for some reason YouTube highly compresses everything that’s not HD making my original videos poor quality) so the quality will be better than they were before.

Made It into the ClickBank 100 Again!

Steven Holdaway — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 23:41:36 +0000

Just received an email from Terra Goeres (ClickBank’s Client Development manager) informing me that I made it into ClickBank’s Premeir Elite for 2010. Basically, this means that ClickBank added up the sales figures for everyone in ClickBank over the past year and the amount they came up with for me was high enough to rank me in the top 100 of everyone in ClickBank. Unfortunately, they don’t tell me my rank and they don’t tell me how much I sold (although i can figure this out) so there’s not much i can go on to say how much was required to get in the top 100 for 2010.

Anyway, you get a few perks such as an account manager and faster product approvals/customer service as well as a certificate they mail to you sometime late in February. So I’m looking forward to that. I’ll post a picture of it when I receive it.

I’m looking forward to helping some of you to get into the ClickBank 100 very soon!