You can see a list of both Google Adwords Qualified Individuals and Companies here

Spark’s Adwords qualification is verified here

For quite some time, a company could become a Google Analytics Qualified Company by completing the following tasks:

- Provide comprehensive details of 3 verifiable, paid, expertly deployed Google Analytics projects with 3 different clients we can contact for reference. Case studies must demonstrate a familiarity with the full range of Google Analytics features, most notably ecommerce reporting, filters/funnels, advanced segment use, custom reporting etc. Please also provide examples of customizing code for your clients. Case studies should include ample text to convey the work undertaken and your methodologies for approaching such projects.

- You offer a range of stand alone paid services related to Google Analytics, including implementation, configuration, training, and consulting. Please list your current Google Analytics services and the approximate prices charged. (Also please include any training materials you present to your clients when doing GA training. This could include the agenda and course materials your clients can take home to use as reference after the class.)

– You must have a proven expertise in web analytics. Please list any speaking engagements at conferences, influential blogs, white papers, management bios, ad campaigns, marketing programs, and/or other evidence
demonstrating your expertise with analytics and your ability to evangelize web analytics.

- Provide a link to your website that prominently describes your stand alone Google Analytics services.

- If accepted into the program, you agree to send at least one employee to the Google Analytics Authorized Consultant summit at your own expense (generally held once per year over 4 days in Mountain View, CA, USA, covering technical, marketing and business topics as deemed appropriate by the GAAC team).

- You will provide a report (sent by Google to successful applicants) by the last day of each calendar quarter summarizing all Google Analytics projects you have worked on during the quarter (listing client names and results achieved).

- Have Professional Indemnity/Liability insurance as appropriate for your jurisdiction ($1m in the USA) – if this does not apply to your region, please disregard.

- You must represent a business (individuals do not qualify) and be legally incorporated to do business in your locality.

- Electronic customer support ticketing system to manage customer support requests.

Today, you can now take an individual test and qualify as – what I would call – a more “power user.” This is a great move for Google and encourages individuals to take their online training and write the exam. I expect Google will add a minimum level of users who have passed their IQ into the requirements for Company certification soon. Our plan will be to have a minimum of two of our internet marketing team members qualified.

Quick Points:
You need a 75% or above to pass (same as Google Adwords).
There is a “certificate” you can download at the end in .pdf format, no sign of a logo you can use yet
Certifications are valid for 18 months

You can register for the test here ($50)

I plan on taking this tonight and hopefully will be certified by tomorrow!

Step 1. Access your Google Analytics account from within AdWords
Step 2. Click the “Edit Account Settings” link from the first page
Step 3. Click “Unlink your account from Analytics”

Vola – your done…

For the record, if you do this in error and want to re-link – that is not a problem but your AdWords data will be erased from the account. Also… be careful of the link below as you can completely delete your Analytics account!

Tech-related
1. TWIT
2. Buzz Out Loud
3. GDGT Weekly
4. MacBreak Weekly
5. Digital Planet

Current Events
1. 60 Minutes
2. From Our Own Correspondent

Food
1. Jamie’s Ministry of Food Recipes

As many of you probably know, facebook did a complete site re-design – much to the dislike of some of its users.  Regardless of your opinion on the change, this did allow Facebook to post their ads on the right hand side of the screen, rather than the left as was the case in Facebooks initial design.

Along with the new design came the arrival of two Facebook PPC ads being posted to profile pages, group pages, photo albums and the like.  Perhaps its just me, but did anyone happen to notice the arrival of a THIRD ad to their profile pages?

As an advertiser, I don’t remember seeing any notification or press release about this… did you?

It will be interesting to see how this affects conversion rates from Facebook campaign…

What is Google Moderator?

A free service that will help track discussion topics within circles or companies.  Say for example, you have a company wide meeting and you want your staff to provide feedback and post questions they want answered.  Individuals can log into Moderator, post questions and vote up other questions they want answered in order of priority.  Something like this would be especically effective for internet marketing companies who have staff far and wide… in places like California, Australia, Toronto, Croatia and India (just as a totally random example ).

Outside of a company based tool, it also proves to be a useful place for individuals to post and vote up questions of interest on topics like presidential debates, world issues and more.

Have a look, let me know what you think of it.

Before, it was mandatory to insert a rather ugly “Google Site Stats – send feedback” logo on your thank you page.  To be honest, i really never thought this was necessary or improved the users experience in any way. I can’t imagine Google got a lot of “send feedback” submissions as most people wouldn’t care to click the logo.

Good move in my opinion to give advertisers the option to place the logo or not.  For my future accounts, I will be selecting the “None” option.

What I love more about the Olympics is the opportunity to learn about other countries and cultures. A spirit captured by one of our staff in Australia. This is Stuart’s 5 year old son Jack, who learned all about Canada in his class study of the Olympics.

Though we have no medals (yet), though we will always live in the shadow of our neighbour to the south, though we will most likely be subjected to hours of commentary of how we underfund amateur sport… we are still a proud nation – with fans around the world!

To Jack… Canada salutes you – Nice flag eh!

The idea of this tool is to give the end user a glimpse into some search history, compare peaks and valley’s to news articles (much the same way Google Trends did) but also give a user the ability to understand search behaviour. It has some really powerful features, especially for an Internet Marketing agency like ours

Some very cool features include a “heat map” of the world or any geographic region you want to target and the corresponding rising search terms for a particular keyword you are examining. Additionally, you can compare up to 5 search terms and see how a users search habits differ across geographic areas. For example, if you are in the market for Laisk surgery – the west coast of the U.S. might be more inclined to use the search phrase “lasik eye surgery” while the east coast might use the phrase “laser eye surgery” more often. As an advertiser, it is important to segment these keywords and phrases depending on the target market you are focused on.

Furthermore, you can filter your queries by various categories. One example might be “java” which will have a different meaning depending on if you are looking for a programming language or a hot cup of coffee. Using the category drop down will allow you to segment the data accordingly.

You can also look at search trends by a particular date range. The default is set to 2004 – present but opening the drop down allows you to select some set ranges as well as a custom range.

Comparing your data by “location” and “time ranges” is also an option which can present some very powerful data but only for the top searches for the day, not custom keywords you select.

The tool also has a handy export feature to excel.

I was puzzled by the numbers that appear in the graph and upon further investigation found that these aren’t actual search numbers but rather “normalized” numbers that Google is displaying. You can read more about this here.

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

1. Have a billing and mailing address in a country where company qualification is available.
2. 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.
3. Build and maintain the minimum 90-day required total client spend (spend requirements vary by country) for the company’s My Client Center account.

In Canada, a company must maintain a minimum of $100,000 over a 90-day time period to receive certification.

For good measure, Spark also has its Yahoo Ambassador and MSN Adwords certification in addition to its new Google Qualified Company status.

Spark would like to thank our PPC clients for entrusting their internet marketing to us and helping us meet this goal!

Jarkko Laine breaks down a well thought out list of top female bloggers in the industry in this thorough article. My favourite main point in this article is that more women are becoming a part of the technology industry overall, blogging regularly and encouraging other women to get involved. This is a very positive message for those of us just starting out in the industry.

Instead of repeating the list of women here, what I am going to do is lay out the top 10 and also the ones that I found most interesting and have started to subscribe to. Can’t learn enough! I have to note one little peeve if you will indulge me. When trying to add some of these top 50 blogs to my Google Reader collection…some did not have an RSS feed available or have it noticeable. If bloggers are looking for an audience than please please please make your RSS feed link noticeable, available, clear…anything that would encourage me to click on it. PLEASE!!!! Further, if you don’t have an RSS link available to your audience…go get one! I can’t imagine that people are writing just for them…there has to be an audience of sorts. Rant complete!

Back on track. I have only entered the world of blogs in the last 2 years so it is a fairly exciting and new discovery on my part. Reading new information from a variety of sources on a regular basis is very exciting. Please feel free to share your favourite blogs and reasons why you love them! I appreciate your recommendations.

Alright…to the top 10 on the list of the most influential female bloggers:

10. Lisa Sugar

Sugar is the Editor-in-Chief of Sugar Publishing and started www.popsugar.comthat houses several networks surrounding celebrity gossip. NxE noted that her blog is significant because the project has been funded by Sequoia (they also funded Google and Youtube)…should be something to watch out for!

9. Ana Marie Cox

Cox has made herself famous, if you will, by writing political gossip as www.Wonkette.com with her alias Wonkette Emerita. The popularity of Wonkette gave her writer’s kudos in the world of politics. She wrote in Time Magazine’s blog and is currently the editor of Radar.

Personally, I love both Canadian and American politics and as such, will be taking a look at Cox’s work. It sounds exciting!! Who can resist?!

8. Xeni Jardin

Jardin is a woman of many talents as a tech culture journalist; co-editor of www.boingboing.net; co-host of Boing Boing tv; articles published in Los Angeles Times, MSNBC, Playboy and many more. NxE also notes that Jardin has also appeared on radio, television, and runs the Xeni Tech podcast. She is edgy and controversial…a love her or hate her personality and part of a hugely growing community online.

7. Heather Armstrong

Armstrong is well known for being fired from her job after gossiping about her co-workers and company on her blog. I love her already! She writes under the nickname, Dooce and her style is both fun and personal. According to NxE, “her incisive writing, wit and honesty” has given her a unique writing style and landed her in spot number 7. Check it out www.dooce.com! I have also subscribed to this one.

6. Erin Kissane

Kissane is the writer and editorial strategist for good editorial practices and business communications. Her blog, www.alistapart.com is an important resource to web developers. NxE totes her as a person who will “define what the Internet will be today and in the future.”

5 . Michelle Malkin

Malkin is known for her political socially conservative perspective and has made appearances on MSNBC, Fox News, and C-SPAN. Her writing is very controversial…so you know I will be checking it out! Plainly, when Malkin speaks and writes…people listen and read.

www.michellemalkin.com

4. Pamela Jones

Jones is the online legal guru focusing on issues surrounding open source and free software community. She keeps the rest of us non-legal minded folk up to date. She is currently the editor of www.groklaw.net and has offered her knowledge to the book Open Source 2.0: The Continuing Evolution.

3. Gina Trapani

Trapani is one of the best writers of technology and productivity today. She has acquired a committed large readership. Lifehacker is a Gawker media web blog that provides tips and tricks, software and information to its followers. NxE says that it is a “must-read for many people, bloggers, and non-bloggers alike.” This will now be moved to my top 5 list!

www.lifehacker.com

2. Ariana Huffington

How does this sound: 12 books, co-founder and editor of the www.huffingtonpost.com. Huffington Post is a political blog and another on my list to follow. Huffington Post is the fourth ranked blog on Technorati and gets more than 18 million page views this month. It also helps that she has a few noted celebrity friends, according to NxE, such as Norman Mailer and Nora Ephron. Time Magazine listed Ariana Huffington on their list of 100 Most Influential People in 2006.

1. Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort Page & Jory Des Jardins

The top female blogger is a team effort from these three women that are meeting and writing for the purpose of promoting a community site that encourages and supports female bloggers. These ladies have planned and are continuing to plan events that encourage woman to start and succeed at blogging. This is a blog that myself and all other women reading this blog should check out. www.blogher.com

Happy Reading!

~S