If a stranger in a particularly giving mood handed you $25,000 in AdWords budget to spend on a complete PPC makeover, where would you start?
Expand onto the Display Network? Overhaul your remarketing strategy? Uncover neat new keyword opportunities?
Whatever your AdWords dreams are, the $25,000 PPC Challenge will allow you to achieve your PPC goals and then some.
Successfully advertising on AdWords is difficult for veteran search marketers and small-business owners alike. Even a big PPC budget isn’t necessarily enough to beat out your competition. You need a solid account structure, inspiring ad creative, and the right tools to help you figure out what’s working and what isn’t.
But hey, money is nice too!
Grade and Get Paid isn’t just an opportunity to win $25,000 to spend on your AdWords campaigns; the lucky winner will also get a full year’s subscription to WordStream Advisor, our flagship software and the leading online advertising platform in customer satisfaction. Actionable insights, enough ad spend to execute on them, and software to keep you on the path to PPC success: in the business, we call that “the dream.”
How, you might ask? Great question.
How does it work?
To get started, simply visit the Grade and Get Paid page on our website between September 12 and November 12, 2017 (at 11:59 pm ET, if you’re a procrastinator).
You’ll be prompted to run the AdWords Performance Grader on your account (don’t worry: it’s secure, fast, and free). Over the years, we’ve analyzed more than $9 billion in ad spend, picking up all sorts of insights along the way. We use a combination of this proprietary data and your own account history to generate a performance report for your account. It’ll look something like this:
Your grader report is your roadmap to AdWords success. This initial run will include an overall, aggregate score as well as individual, category-level scores for 11 separate categories. Armed with this information we’ll ask you to answer two questions:
- What did you learn from your AdWords Performance Grader report?
- After reading your report, what will you do differently in the future
From the moment you click “Complete My Entry,” you’ll have 30 days to leverage your grader report’s prescriptive advice to improve your account’s performance.
With so many different categories to choose from, deciding where to begin can be a bit overwhelming. I suggest starting with the low-hanging fruit (those simple, easy-to-execute actions that’ll yield maximal returns) before digging into the more complex items the report identifies, like landing page optimization and ad rotation. When in doubt, adding new long-tail and negative keywords can have a profound impact on CPC and wasted spend, respectively.
Once you hit that 30-day mark, we’ll automatically run your AdWords account through the Performance Grader a second time and email you the results. If you’ve been diligent about account activity, you can expect to see some major improvements (if you’ve been putting in the work, there will be improvements!).
Of course, just because your participation in the contest ends after 30 days doesn’t mean you should stop optimizing your AdWords account; continue to follow the advice in your second grader report to ensure that, regardless of whether you win the $25,000, you’re crushing your competition.
Speaking of, we’ll announce our winner on December 11, 2017, after every participant has received their second grader report. Victory is based on elbow grease: The account that makes the greatest improvement over a 30-day period will claim the Grand Prize…
Grand Prize? Tell me more!
As I mentioned earlier, the account that shows the most improvement between its first and second AdWords Performance Grader report will be eligible to win:
- $25,000 towards your 2018 Google AdWords advertising budget (reimbursed monthly by WordStream at a maximum monthly value up to US$2,083/CD$2,604/£1,628 per month for twelve (12) months from January 1, 2018 – December 31, 2018)
- A free one-year subscription to WordStream Advisor, our multi-channel online advertising software
- Exposure for your business on the WordStream blog and website, in case-studies and other press opportunities related to the contest
While the first two represent tangible business value, don’t sleep on that last bullet point; our blog receives more than a million unique visitors each month, making it the perfect springboard for those brand-building campaigns you’ve always wanted to run.
Who’s Eligible?
The WordStream “$25,000 Grade and Get Paid” Contest is a trade promotion open only to small to medium businesses in the U.S. and Canada (excluding Quebec) and United Kingdom that have an active Google AdWords account (“AdWords account”) in good standing with a past 90-day spend of no more than US$50,000 ($17,000 per month) / CD$65,000 (CD$22,000 per month) / £40,000 (/£13,000 per month). An individual can enter more than one Google AdWords account (as defined by a unique account ID) for the contest, but there is only one entry per unique account. For more information, please visit the Official Rules page.
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What are you waiting for? Outclimb your competition, reach the PPC summit, and start improving your AdWords account today!