You know what; I am kicking myself for not taking part, 1 in 30 chance of winning is pretty sweet odds, I do hope to see such incentives kicking about in future. And just like to say well done to yourself and Paul for working on this, my understanding is you guys gave your time and expertise to help this unique trail take place.

Thanks for sharing.

As I say, it gives people good ideas and its a great way of seeing/hearing about sales you wouldn’t normally otherwise.

I actually have a reason to open up my email inbox every morning now

The point of the list is that there’s a higher quality-threshold than most other forums. The closest analog would be SitePoint’s Premium Sites section. As a very rough rule of thumb, the sites generally have 10k+ visitors/mo or earnings in the thousands USD/mo.

There’s been the odd exception so far, but it’s very early days for the list.

The $70k site you mention was more of a conventional business than just a website, with an owner in no hurry to sell. Most are priced far more realistically.

Keep the feedback coming, and let me know if you’d like to see a few of the higher end sites we’ve had come through since the list started earlier this month. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Monthly Income: is $2.5k
Price: $70k

Still good to give you ideas if nothing else.

Google is doing changes to Adwords on a frequent basis. The option to set up keywords on the campaign level may be new. (I have never set up negative keywords at campaign level) However, it is inflexible for some websites because the negative keywords at the campaign level can impact all ad groups included within that campaign. For those who have different marketing purposes for each ad group, negative keywords must be set at the ad group level for sure.

There has always been a debate about whether Adwords optimization should be done by outsiders or in-house. I have got 2 years experience with Google Adwords in China, one of them was spent on doing Adwords optimization for clients and I am now doing some in-house optimization now for a new start-up company.

In China, Google’s approach to selling Adwords is through authorized resellers. However, resellers tend not to fully undertand the needs of their clients. I have seen lots of websites with al kinds of expectations from Adwords, I must say that Google has some inflexible approach to client’s Adwords structure, and very often,making advertisers feel they lose lots of money to Google.

When you switch your role from doing optimization for someone else to doing it for your own employer or company, you will easily find that the way of thinking regarding how to maximize Adwords’s benefits is indeed different.

Hope to share more with you in the future

Regards,

Wei

Personally, I sense such a conflict of interest that I don’t think I’d want G tweaking my campaigns.

I had thought of creating a whisky blog at one time but worried that i would just use it as an excuse to spend more time in the boozer (especially if i actually believed i knew what i was talking about).

Think whiskey.com is taken however - yeah good domain names.

Martin

It doesn’t matter whether it is AdWords, AdSense, Gmail or plain old search, the company that smugly likes to think of itself as one that “does no evil” is absolutely terrible at support.

By way of contrast, the support people at Microsoft AdCenter are unfailingly nice and helpful.

Who’d of thought it, Microsoft get something right for once!

Overall I think the Google AdWords support team are fantastic - my account manager certainly goes beyond the call of duty when it comes to helping out. He is always ready to troubleshoot problems and gives good ideas to improve current campaigns.

However, I must agree that when it comes to them optimising campaigns, they definitely aren’t so hot.

Thanks for the tip - I’ll take a look at that soon