| The Definitive Guide to Adwords (over 200 pages) by Perry Marshall offers an approach to getting started on a profitable foot with Google pay-per-click (PPC), known as Google Adwords. To quote Perry himself, the guide shows you 'how to Beat the learning curve and generate instant web traffic with the world's fastest direct marketing machine'.
The book is broken up into several clear-cut sections. The first chapter explains step-by-step how to set up your first adwords campaign. Screenshots are included for each step so you can follow along and do exactly what is instructed. There is also a "Getting Started Ad Content Checklist" which summarized the chapter and can be useful. Other tools and services are also recommended in this chapter to help you optimize your campaign.
The next "Managing the Basics" chapter goes into detail about how to improve the efficiency of your Adwords campaigns. Once you get up and running, you next want to make sure you are getting the most for your money which is where so many first time users go wrong. This section shows you how to organise your ads, keywords etc, so that they will pull in more qualified leads/customers/buyers or whatever it is that you want. Google actually rewards you for creating relevant ads and they penalize you for creating ads that, according to them, are not relevant. In a nutshell, more relevant ads get better Click Through Rates (CTRs), cost less and come up higher in the search results. There are many examples that can help you out in this chapter as well.
The next Definitive Guide to Adwords chapter is called "Making Your Traffic Pay". It goes over conversion techniques, tracking, split testing and other important issues. As you probably already are aware, traffic doesn't do you any good unless you can convert it into customers. Here Perry also discusses the difference between the search traffic and the content traffic and when and if you should use both. As in the first chapters, there are also many examples to help guide you through.
"Tools, Tips & Tricks" discusses Google image ads, Google Adsense, and other lesser-known features of Google as well as other helpful tips to do with marketing your products and/or services.
In the "Your Questions Answered" chapter, frequently asked questions are addressed. Also, tips are given about how to deal with competitive (expensive) keywords.
"Improving Your World" is a more informational, rather than instructional, chapter. And the last chapter goes on to describe more tools and services that are offered by the author. And the epilogue teaches you how and why to build a list of customers and make "backend sales" which is very important as well.
The Definitive Guide to Adwords is especially praised for its specific, step-by-step instructions and examples. It is also considered very easy to follow along as it mixes up instruction with stories and examples to break up the content. |