Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords

How to Access 100 Million People in 10 Minutes

Perry Marshall, Mike Rhodes, Bryan Todd

• Publisher: Entrepreneur Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781613083710
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

Covering the latest breaking news in Google AdWords, the fifth edition introduces revised, expanded and new chapters covering Enhanced Campaigns, Google AdWord's Express, Google's Product Listing Ads, and the introduction to Google's Universal Analytics. Nuances in Big Data advertising are also revealed and expanded sections and necessary updates have been added throughout. Updates specific to this edition include:

• Powerful bidding strategies using remarketing lists for search ads
• New ad extension features
• Automation capabilities using AdWords scripts
• Bonus Online Content that includes links to dozens of resources and tutorials covering: registering a domain name, setting up a website, selecting an email service, choosing a shopping cart service, finding products to sell, and starting up an Google AdWords accountReaders are given the latest information paired with current screenshots, fresh examples, and new techniques. Coached by AdWords experts Perry Marshall, Mike Rhodes, and Bryan Todd advertisers learn how to build an aggressive, streamlined AdWords campaign proven to increase their search engine visibility, consistently capture clicks, double their website traffic, and increase their sales. Whether a current advertiser or new to AdWords, this guide is a necessary handbook.

Chapter 1

Chisel Your Way In

Frank Talk about the Google AdWords of Today

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Two or five or ten years from now, the story of you and all the other players in your market will be exactly like the story of Google vs. Excite, HotBot, InfoSeek, AltaVista, Yahoo!, and MSN: a bunch of losers; a couple who turned out sort of OK; and one massive success story.

I want YOU to be the success story. The Alpha Dog.

If you want to get to the meaty stuff fast, don’t skip this. This is not the typical book intro where someone yammers on about the last three editions and gushes about all the wonderful souls who were helped along the way.

I’m going to outline a few vital strategies that determine whether YOU succeed or fail in online marketing and Google AdWords. I’ll conclude with some frank discussion on what it takes to make AdWords work today. Stick with me a minute for a brief internet history lesson.

Remember the dotcom bubble? Remember when half the world thought Jeff Bezos of Amazon was a genius and the other half deemed him a bloody fool? Do you remember the late ’90s when it was obvious to everybody (OK, almost everybody) that the internet was a Very Big Deal and it was here to stay and the stakes were very, very big?

The internet is not merely another communication medium. As my friend Tom Hoobyar said, it is a fundamental shift for humanity that’s as important as the discovery of fire.

The reason the dotcom bubble happened was, investors and entrepreneurs alike knew that winning this game would be a very, very big deal.

I remember sometime around 1999–2000, Yahoo! Auctions was trying to make a go of it. I was selling stuff on eBay, so I tried Yahoo! Auctions, too. They were advertising all over the place, and their fees were lower.

I quickly found out Yahoo! Auctions didn’t have as many buyers. My stuff didn’t fetch as high a price on Yahoo! as it got on eBay. I didn’t want sell an item for $17 on Yahoo! if it would fetch $20 on eBay.

As a seller, I wanted to go where the buyers are. Buyers want to go where the sellers are. The synergy between buyers and sellers is called the Network Effect. The Network Effect says the value of a network is equal to the number of members squared. So if in 1999 Yahoo! had one million users and eBay had two million, eBay wasn’t twice as powerful; eBay was four times as powerful. Nothing Yahoo! might do could overcome eBay’s 4X power advantage.

As you know, eBay went on to become the number-one auction site. A respectable number-two doesn’t even exist today. And unless eBay makes some major, catastrophic mistake, no one will ever be able to displace them—no matter how much money they spend. Someone could spend $100 billion trying to revive Yahoo! Auctions, and it would never work.

The Network Effect is twice as big a deal on the internet as in the brick-and-mortar world. Why? Because the internet is almost frictionless. The frictionless quality of the internet paradoxically introduces a new kind of friction: the nearly effortless dominance of the number-one player over all others; the other players are at their mercy. If someone tried to revive Yahoo! Auctions, eBay would always be only one click away. So Yahoo! Auctions doesn’t stand a chance.

This has everything to do with you and your quest to dominate your market. I will get to that in just a minute. First, a quick story.

In 2002, I went to my first internet marketing conference, Ken McCarthy’s System Seminar. There, I heard Jon Keel speak on pay-per-click (PPC). Jon was my first true inspiration as an online marketer. He devoted most of his presentation to Overture, which was the dominant PPC service at the time. It was a total revelation when he explained the dynamics of PPC and showed us the Overture Keyword tool, an early forerunner of Google’s Keyword Planner tool.

Jon spent a few minutes talking about Google AdWords, which he hadn’t played with much yet. I went home and opened my first AdWords account. Within a few days, I knew I’d discovered the most amazing direct-response marketing tool in the history of man. A beautiful magic carpet ride began, and the rest, as they say, is history.

By this time, eBay was already the king of online auctions. I understood that once they had this position, it would be so hard for anyone to ever steal it away from them. So while Jon was talking, I raised my hand and asked:

“Jon, is it possible for a pay-per-click engine to become a search monopoly sort of like eBay has a monopoly on auctions?”

Jon didn’t know. I had a hunch it was true. But I didn’t know why.

This was April 2002. At this time, Google was just yet another player in the dogfight between MSN, Yahoo!, AltaVista, HotBot, Excite, Infoseek, and a dozen others. At that point, there was no clear winner. They were all just beginning to move away from the “free” model. Search engine optimization (SEO) was still easy to game.

I personally liked Google much more than the rest, but I was a minority. Many people still didn’t even know what Google was. Nobody at the time dreamed that Google was poised to become the 800-pound gorilla of the internet.

In those early days of AdWords, I wondered:

In this frictionless world, where every search engine is only one click away from any other, only one browser setting away from being the default, how is any one search engine going to dominate?

In hindsight, that was a dumb question. Here’s the right question:

If one ________ (search engine, auction site, map, ecommerce store, butcher, baker, candlestick maker) is clearly just a little bit better than everyone else, what is going to keep EVERYBODY from clicking over to them and buying from them instead?

And when that fabled tipping point happens, and they get thousands or millions or billions more dollars in their coffers, what is going to keep them from re-investing the profits and getting better and better until they are absolutely unbeatable—like eBay?

What Google did next after that conference in 2002 was the thing I couldn’t quite foresee.

A year later, AdWords hit critical mass. It reached that spot where everyone was seeing their competitors’ ads on Google and wanted to know how they got there. Google became a gravitational force where affiliate marketers figured out every word in the whole English language (and most other languages) was up for sale. The world got sucked in.

Where Overture was clunky and poorly thought out, AdWords was elegant and magnificently executed. Sure, AdWords had its flaws, but it was fundamentally right. It was a marketer’s dream. During the next five years, Google exploded with breathtaking force. Google fast outpaced Overture as a PPC platform, raking in billions of dollars and going public.

Google, which was a little bit better than all the other search engines, started getting a lot better.

Google Maps became almost dreamlike in its sophistication. Soon, you could take a virtual tour of anywhere with Street View. Google bought YouTube, which became the world’s number-two search engine and the default place where everyone uploads videos of their kids’ ballet recital.

AdWords started adding features, eventually getting to where almost every form of targeting you can imagine became possible, no matter how granular. Local businesses started tuning into Google Maps. Consultants and agencies started selling “I’ll get you listed on Google.”

Add Gmail and Google News and smaller services like Google Scholar (a search engine for academic books and papers), and Google becomes entrenched, as unbeatable as eBay. The other search engines were and are vastly inferior. You’d have to spend a trillion dollars to unseat Google, and you would still probably fail.

This “winner-take-all” phenomenon is what the dotcom excitement was really all about. Sure, there was a lot of dumb stuff, talking socks and whatnot. People do dumb stuff when trillions of dollars are on the line. But they knew the rewards would be big. The present dominance of Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook proves that.

OK, so what does this have to do with you?

The winner-take-all phenomenon is just as true at your level and in your market as it was for Google and eBay. Right this very minute. Especially if you run a pure online business or any business with national or international borders.

In my book 80/20 Sales and Marketing, I describe how it’s a law of nature that 80 percent of the money comes from 20 percent of the customers, 80 percent of the sales come from 20 percent of the products, and 80 percent of the cars drive on 20 percent of the roads. 80/20 applies to almost everything you do in business.

But here’s what I don’t really explain in that book:

On the internet, most things aren’t 80/20. They’re 90/10!

The web, the “great equalizer,” the leveler of all playing fields, is even more unequal. 90 percent of the customers use 10 percent of the search engines. Ninety percent of your traffic comes from 10 percent of your ad campaigns. Ten percent of the advertisers get 90 percent of the traffic.

Winners win BIG on the internet.

Losers lose BIG on the internet because it’s so frictionless.

Winners rise to the top faster.

Online marketing is a blood sport. You are playing for keeps. If you think Google AdWords is just going to be this little thing that you do, some task you delegate to your part-time assistant . . . if you’re going to stick your toe in the water and dabble in it . . . if you think you’re just going to spend an hour or two, buy some clicks and get rich . . . .

Then ditch this book right now and go find some other delusion to indulge in.

Because it’s NOT going to work that way.

You’re either going to do this right, dominate, and go home with the spoils, or you’re going to go home with your tail between your legs. You’ll be like the long-extinct Yahoo! Auctions, and the whole thing will be a painful lesson and tax write-off.

This is not some interesting miscellaneous activity that’s going to make you a little extra money. This is big.

If you want it to be.

Know this going in: if you’re not serious, don’t even start.

If you’re in business at all, this is the game you are playing. It is a 90/10 game, and you’re either among the broke wannabe 90 or the opulent 10. There isn’t much of an in-between space. If you’re not one of the top three, you’re toast. And this is not just true on Google. It’s true everywhere on the internet.

Some may tell you otherwise . . . but they are lying. There’s no lack of flimflam men on the web. So if you want to make a middling living doing mediocre work and getting paid mediocre money, go get a job as a barmaid or security guard. Go babysit a kiosk at the mall where you’re guaranteed that you can accost a few dozen people every hour as they walk by.

But if you’re going to play on the internet, you need to pick a game you can win. And then...