Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords – by Perry Marshall, Mike Rhodes, and Bryan Todd

New to AdWords or an experienced Marketer, read this book to learn/optimize your Google Ads knowledge.

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IF YOU’RE A RANK BEGINNER . . .

There’s an old saying “You can’t learn to ride a bicycle at a seminar,” and it definitely applies to AdWords. AdWords and really everything you ever do in direct marketing is hands-on. It’s not theory. It’s real world. It’s the school of hard knocks.

About the school-of-hard-knocks part: When AdWords was brand new,

there were lots of inexpensive clicks, and you could find your way by making lots of cheap mistakes.

Those days are over. Today, that strategy will get you slaughtered.

When you open a Google AdWords account, go ahead and enter your keywords, write some ads, and set some bid prices. It’s OK if you don’t really know what you’re doing; you’ll learn. The first few chapters of this book will show you exactly how to do it. But here’s the most important thing of all:

Set a low daily budget, say $5 or $10 per day, to make absolutely sure that your first experience with AdWords is a GOOD one—not a painful one —because:

Another giant mistake advertisers make is assuming that Google is “benevolent.” Not! And if I had a dollar for every person who told me, “The Google rep called me with some friendly suggestions and . . . well, I lost thousands of dollars,” I’d be a good deal richer. Google does have a Green Beret team of crackerjack reps who know what they’re doing, but only huge advertisers and premium agencies get those guys. Everybody else gets reps who are hustling to meet sales quota. Most Google reps have never spent a single dollar of their own money buying Google ads, let alone been required to make a profit and meet payroll. And once they have your money, you will never get it back. Sleep with one eye open.

The best thing you can do is enjoy the process of watching those clicks come in and seeing your handiwork produce results.

Then, if you’re hands-on from the word go, everything you read in this book will make ten times more sense.

So yes, go ahead and get started. Create your AdWords account, roll up your sleeves, and jump in.

We recommend you read the first four chapters to get a good overview of AdWords, direct marketing, and all the strategy behind it.

If you’re just starting out, or you want a refresher, we cover the fundamentals in Chapters 5 through 11. They’ll give you a fantastic grounding.

Then when you’re ready to dive into the more advanced material, Chapters 12 to 37 will cover every advanced technique you need to get into the top 1 percent of all AdWords practitioners.

As you go from one chapter to the next, make changes to your account. You’ll literally be able to see the performance difference in a few hours.

Before you’ve even spent $10 on Google clicks, please make sure you’re using this book as your guide. If you don’t, you’ll make a slew of common mistakes and blow a lot of cash that you could have used to grow your business.

The worst thing you can do in your new career as a Google advertiser is accidentally run up $2,500 of clicks that you have no idea how you’re going to pay for. All advertisers have to go through some trial and error before things really come together. There are many assumptions Google will make about how to set up your account that are wrong, and if you blindly follow its menus, you’ll make some costly mistakes.

IF YOU’RE A VETERAN PAY-PER-CLICK MARKETER . . .

This is the fifth edition of the Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords. We’ve added new chapters and segments that reflect the sharpest and most current Google strategies. These include:

• Bidding
  YouTube ads (this is a new chapter by a new author)
  RLSA (remarketing lists for search ads)
  Advanced campaign types
  AdWords Experiments
  Mike Rhodes’ Remarketing Grid
  AdWords Scripts (a great way to automate elements of your reporting
• and ongoing management work) Plus, we’ve got significant updates on:
• Ad extensions
  Google Display Network Conversion tracking
• Ongoing management
  Google Analytics and Tag Manager

If you’re a seasoned veteran, if you’ve read the previous editions of this book, or if you’re already a pay-per-click ninja, I bet you’ve never seen these before.

About the Authors

Perry Marshall

Perry Marshall is one of the world’s most expensive and sought-after business consultants. Clients seek his ability to integrate engineering, sales, art, and psychology.

He launched two movements in modern marketing. His Google AdWords books laid the foundations for the $100 billion pay-per-click industry, and techniques he pioneered are standard best practices.

More recently, he’s turned “80/20” into a verb. Not just a fact about your business, 80/20 is action you take on your business. It’s the central lever for every great strategy. His book 80/20 Sales and Marketing is mandatory reading in many growing companies. His books are course material in several business schools.

Works also include bestseller Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising (Entrepreneur Press, 3rd Edition 2017), Evolution 2.0: Breaking the Deadlock Between Darwin and Design (BenBella, 2015), and Industrial Ethernet (ISA, 3rd Edition 2017).

Bryan Todd

Bryan Todd is a writer and web traffic specialist in Lincoln, Nebraska. He’s worked in both Europe and Asia and has spent most of his career teaching— from foreign languages and world history to advanced testing methods for the internet. He has worked with clients in dozens of industries from health care and book publishing to manufacturing and computer software.

Mike Rhodes

Mike Rhodes is an AdWords evangelist. As a popular speaker, digital strategist, and CEO of WebSavvy.com.au and AgencySavvy.com, he loves nothing more than to dive into the Google machine, pull it apart, deeply understand it, and share that knowledge with the world.

He’s been asked by Google to consult on how to improve AdWords, worked directly on over 1,000 accounts, and has taught thousands of business owners and marketing managers how to use the power of this tool to grow their business.

Mike founded WebSavvy in 2006 to offer a “done for you” service to those businesses that didn’t want to learn but just wanted to grow their businesses and their profits. His team manages tens of millions of dollars in ad spending and guarantees their results.
A devoted dad and husband, he lives in Melbourne, Australia, with his wife and two daughters.