The top 10 Google Adwords job interview questions
That's it, you just got this long awaited confirmation in your mailbox that the company you've applied to liked your CV and would like to interview you for a Google Adwords Campaign Manager job. But how do you prepare for such an interview?
Well, reviewing your Google Adwords certificate courses is certainly a good starting point. However, you may soon find yourself swamped with too much information if you decide to go through Google's tutorials. That's why in this post we've listed what we think are the top 10 recurring questions that you're likely to come across at a Google Adwords job interview.
1. How is a Google Adwords Campaign typically structured?
That's a basic question for anybody in the Search industry, but lots of hiring managers will wanted to start from there just to find out whether they'd rather cut the interview short in case they're talking to a candidate who doesn't know the basics. You sould mention 4 concepts here, in hierarchical order: Campaigns, Ad Groups, Ads and finally Keywords.
2. What's the difference between Broad Match, Phrase Match and Exact Match in Google Adwords?
This one is a classic. There is no way a Digital Marketing Manager will hire a Google Adwords Campaign Manager who doesn't know his keyword matches, for the simple reason that applying the wrong keyword matches to an Ad Group will result in either poor impression share in case of an excessive Exact Match usage, or poor ROA for Ad groups that focus too much on Broad Match.
3. Is there a way to find out the exact keywords visitors are using when accessing my website?
Yes, Google Adwords has a Search Terms section where you can see the actual search queries your visitors used before clicking on your ad. People often get confused about the difference between Adwords Keywords (the keywords you choose to target in Adwords) and Adwords Search Terms (what people are actually searching for). When using broad match or phrase match keywords in Adwords, you actually open your campaign to a wide range of Search Terms that somehow relate to those keywords, but that don't necessarily exactly match your keywords.
4. What's a good way to optimize your Google Adwords campaign's keywords?
If you've answered correctly the previous question, this one is pretty much a no-brainer. Google Adwords's Search Term section gives you real-life search behavior, which means you can figure out whether your Adwords Keywords are being triggered by the right type of searches. You can give the example of a car rental service who uses broad/phrase match for a specific car brand, and who ends up exposing their ads to people who are actually looking to purchase that specific car model rather than renting it. The Search Terms report would inform you about those search queries that include words such as "buy" or "purchase", so you may filter them out from your Ad Groups (either by using negative keywords, or by focusing on exact match).
5. How do you make sure your keywords have the best possible Adwords Quality Score?
Here again, you can re-use your explanation from the interview's last question, explaining that optimizing your keywords through the Adwords Search Terms report will allow for higher CTR's on your ads, which is a positive signal used by Google's Quality Score algorithm. But more generally, you should mention the importance of having well organizing Adwords Campaigns where the different Ad Groups contain a short amount of highly correlated Keywords that are consistent with the Ad Group's ad copy. Also mention the importance of optimizing your landing pages with keywords that are consistent with your visitor's search queries.
6. How can we find out whether our Adwords leads turned into sales?
This would be particularly relevant in case you're interviewing for a company that doesn't use Google Adwords for ecommerce, but rather to generate leads that are converted to sales at a later stage. While Google Adwords is designed to easily measure ecommerce campaigns' ROA, it can't measure the ROA of campaign which sales occur offline as you simply can't implement pixel tracking for transactions that don't take place in a digital environment. Here you should explain that you can retrieve the information stored in your Google Adwords ad URLs and link that information to your Adwords leads in your CRM platform. By doing that, not only can you find out whether a lead came from an Adwords Campaign, you can also know which Ad Group and Keyword were triggered in order to generate that particular lead.
7. How would you use Google Adwords' Display Network to sell our products and services?
Explain that Google GDN allows advertisers to target specific audiences based on their search history. If the company you're interviewing for is a bank, explain that you would know how to reach people who have been searching for the word "mortgages" during the past 3 months. Also explain you could combine that with other Display targeting methods such as Site Placements, so as to only reach people interested in mortgages while they are browsing websites related with finance or real-estate.
8. Our website isn't optimized for mobiles phones yet, can we still use Adwords?
While you should stress the importance to redesign the company's website as soon as possible, highlighting that 50% of traffic now comes from mobile phones, this is also a good chance to show the interviewer your knowledge of Google Adword's device targeting capability. Explain that you could momentarily instruct the platform to only target desktop computers, in order to prevent your ads from showing to mobile users who would increase your advertising spent while lowering your conversion rates due to poor mobile user experience.
9. What would be a benefit of linking our Google Adwords Account to our Google Analytics account?
This is a tricky one, as most of the information relative to Google Adwords that you'll find in your Google Analytics account is actually redundant. Mention that Google Analytics measures visits (or sessions) rather than clicks, which could actually tell you how many clicks get lost along the way from the moment someone clicks your Adwords ads to the moment that person lands on your website. You may find out that a lot of clicks never make it to your website while still being charged in your Adwords invoices, either because your website was down while your ads were still running, or because your ads are being clicked by automated bots that never turn into actual traffic. Another benefit you could mention is Google Analytic's assisted conversion reports, which tell you whether your Adwords traffic is indirectly generating conversions through other channels. This is important, as an Adwords campaigns could be performing much better than you think in the grand scheme of things, once you've figured out how Google Adwords is efficient at initiating your sales process, even though it might not be doing as great a job at closing sales.
10. What's a benefit of using Google Tag Manager for our Adwords Campaigns?
GTM allows you to take out all the hassle of having to request your web developers to implement all the necessary Google Adwords conversion tracking code, as it allows advertisers to take control of how and when pixels and tracking codes are being activated on specific pages of your website. This is important for most companies who want to make sure they're not hiring someone who will waste their web development team's precious time performing unnecessary tasks on the company's website.