If you’ve been paying attention to the messages on your Client Center’s opening screen, you’ll know that Google’s currently looking for Philippine companies interested in securing ‘Qualified Company’ status in the Google Advertising Professionals program.

To become a Qualified Company in the Google Advertising Professionals program, a company must:

• Have a billing and mailing address in a country where company qualification is available.
• Employ at least two Qualified Individuals in the program. Individuals must be qualified under the main company-registered My Client Center account and not their own account. See the requirements for becoming a Qualified Individual.
• Build and maintain the minimum 90-day required total client spend (spend requirements vary by country) for the company’s My Client Center account.

It’s a great way for a search marketing company to differentiate itself in the marketplace, just as it is important for a search marketing consultant to get certified by Google. But the requirements, most notable of which is the $50,000 minimum 90-day total client spend, is just too high for most companies. Nevermind that I know of only 1 other GAP-certified individual in the Philippines. So you’d probably need to hire us both :) or grow your own GAP certified people (contact me for test tips).

If you’re GAP certified, consider getting listed in this directory.

My friend has just passed the Google AdWords Professional certification program. So before I claim she’s the first in the Philippines, are there any other certified AdWords Pros based in the Philippines?

Good times! :)

If you’ve read through the Tuzhilin Report (yawn) by Dr. Alexander Tuzhilin, I know you’ll agree to this: sections 5 to 7 would make a nice handout for teaching PPC to newbies :)

In case you don’t want to read through all 47 pages, here’s the summary:
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One can appreciate the true scale of clickfraud when one of the people testifying to its success earlier does a 180 and cries clickfraud after a thorough investigation of its PPC operation.
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Here’s more evidence that Google is really cranking up efforts to milk the AdWords cash cow for all its worth this quarter: “institutionalized” ad blending.
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Google CEO Eric Schmidt on click fraud:

“Believe me, as a computer scientist, we have the ability to detect the invalid clicks before they reach advertisers,” says Schmidt, who has a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. “The attacks on us are easily detected.”

Schmidt declines to say how pervasive the click scams are or how, exactly, his company combats them. Doing so would help the fraudsters, he says. Schmidt says shareholders shouldn’t worry: Google monitors every click and refunds advertisers for many of the phony ones. (highlights are mine)

If only the world was that perfect :)

Via DenverPost.com.

The Inside AdSense blog has published a short article on how AdWords listings are ranked:

How is Ad Rank determined? While bid price (the price advertisers are willing to pay for each click per thousand impressions) is obviously an important factor, we also calculate advertiser Quality Score to make sure the best performing ads will always appear on your site. Quality Score takes into account factors such as an ad’s relevancy and click-through rate (CTR) (i.e. how likely users are to click on a given ad) because a higher CTR sometimes outweighs the benefits of a higher bid price. This ensures that your site always displays the ads representing the highest revenue potential for you.

No matter how you look at it, Google wins. The best ads will still be the ones with high bids and high CTRs.

Previous Ask Marc sessions have shown that one of the most common pimp my site question relates to niche selection: what niche should I go into? Normally, I’d go into the wherever-you’re-most-comfortable tirade but 9 out of 10 people who ask me equate good niches with profitable niches.

I won’t point you to the exact niches that pay unlike Andy who seems to get a kick out of dropping profitable niches in public, but I will tell you the 3 signs to look out for:
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Will the market support another AdSense-killer? Initially, I thought it would be a contextual version of their Amazon Associates affiliate system. After reading Chris Beasley’s post, it became clear that it was going to be an AdSense clone offering third party sponsored links.
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WebSideStory, the web analytics company recently released a study that shows search engine conversion rates beating other Internet marketing methods, e.g. banner ads, affiliate marketing, comparison sites, referral links, etc.
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