Adwords doubled conversion reporting

Funny thing happened to me…

I had some campaigns running for a website to which I was tracking conversions.

For a few days I had the feeling that I had more conversions reported in my Adwords account, than in reality.

Today I noticed that I was contacted once but had 2 conversions so I looked back a few days and saw that the conversions were actually reported double.

I have not noticed this because I only had a couple of conversions per day and I assumed that maybe the visitors were doing some kind of refresh of the page.

Today I even found out why this was happening. I was inserting the conversion tracking code from a form template. On the conversion page I had the exact same form up on the page and at the bottom of the page. After succesful completion of the form, the tracking code was shown twice. This resulted in double reporting of the conversions.

If I think of it, this behaviour somehow seems logical, but then again isn’t. Google should be able to detect and/or report double inclusion of the code on a single page !

Taking the GAP exam

Today I took a courage plunge and took the GAP exam, early in the morning… and I passed!

(If you don’t know what the GAP exam is, you can find out on the Adwords Learning Center).

It wasn’t neither hard nor easy. I have to say that you probably won’t pass this exam if you have no practical experience with running adwords campaigns.

I myself am relatively new to Adwords having only 3 months of experience in running campaigns, but these 3 months and the fact that I explored every possible option in the Adwords Account, have helped me understand alot and answer general topic questions.

The exam is graded from 0 to 100% with a 75% grade required to pass.
My exam had 109 questions in 90 minutes. I scored around 85% and I am satisfied with the result. If given more time I would have probably scored higher, but I will have the chance next year as the exam has to be taken once a year to maintain the certification. The test is delivered through Prometric.

I have to note that I had some wrong/faulty questions in my exam. I encountered:

• Incomplete questions;
• Two same answers but only one choice;
• unlabeled answers;
• Also the exam website failed during the test and I had around 1 minute of lost time; not much but nevertheless important for the overall experience;

It seems that I am not the only one that experienced issues with the GAP exam.

By the way, because I wasn’t paying attention in the beginning of my Adwords Experience, I omitted the fact that I need an MCC acount for the 90 days / 1000$ spent requirements (besides taking the exam) in order to achieve the Google Qualified Individual (or GQI) certification.

I have at least until December 15 to spend 1000$ of my hard earned currency!

UPDATE: Right now I am a Google Qualified Individual as you can see by this logo:

You can see the exact certification requirements for becoming a Google Qualified Individual here.

In closing I wish you good luck in taking the exam if you are preparing for it and please post your experience with the GAP exam in the comments section, thanks !

The PPC tool I always forget about

I’m no expert in PPC marketing or Google Adwords. I’m just starting out, I learned the ropes and now I’m trying to learn campaign optimization.

When building ad copy I always tend to forget that I can scout out the competition very easy with the Google Ad Preview Tool.

This tool is great because:

• You can’t click by mistake on your own ads thus losing money
• You can see ads from a specific geographic region (country,state,city) or even coordinates
• You can select the language you want to target
• You can select the Google domain to use (.com, .co.uk etc)
• You can see even the ads that do not appear on the first search page

I can’t think of any other at the moment. Do you ?

Also if you know any other usefull Adwords tool please share it to the rest of us.