Thalasar Ventures

Perry Marshal’s “Definitive Guide To AdWords” is in my opinion the best resource for those who are new to Google AdWords and for those with intermediate AdWords experience.

What I like most about this product is that it doesn’t only focus Google AdWords, but that it also provides the reader with the all-important fundamentals of online marketing and building a business for the long-term.

Even if you would know every tiny little bit of Google AdWords, you still wouldn’t succeed in this game as long as you don’t understand the essentials and fundamentals of marketing and building a business on the Internet.

Everything Perry Marshal teaches focuses on a win-win-win situation: For you, your customer and for Google. And from my own experience, that’s definitely the best way to create a thriving, steadily growing and lasting online presence.

Lots of books and tools out there teach a few cheap tricks and “secrets” on how to deceive Google and your customers in order to make a quick buck. And it’s true, you might be able to make a few dollars in the short run, but you won’t get very far with this approach and ultimately you will fail.

Ok, let’s have a quick look what you will learn from this product:

The Definitive Guide to Google AdWords is divided into 10 different parts (about 220 pages in total), each teaching a crucial pillar of successful AdWords marketing. Actually, the guide contains over 50 chapters and it’s impossible to dive into each one of them in this review. So, I will keep it relatively short and provide only the big lines to give you an idea of what to expect from this product.

Part 1: This gives you a very quick overview of Google AdWords and direct marketing in general. Perry Marshal also talks about some of the time tested and proven approaches of successful marketing .These are the strategies that already worked 50 years ago and that will still be working 50 years from now. Again, not many marketers talk about these fundamentals, but in my opinion, they are far more important than a bunch of short-lived tricks and secrets.

Part 2: AdWords and how to find the people who will most likely buy from you. Here you will learn several quite advanced strategies on negative keywords, match types, local targeting, how to beat your competition and get more people to buy from you…

Part 3: How to use AdWords to find out exactly what your customers want and to sell it to them.

Part 4: How to improve your click-through-rate and what you need to do to pay much less for your clicks and get better ad positions at the same time.

Part 5: Tracking and split-testing. How to outsmart your competition. Improving your conversion rates.

Part 6: Getting more traffic: The content network, finding the websites where your customer hangs out, image ads, Yahoo and MSN.

Part 7: Some highly advanced strategies most people don’t know: Do less, earn more and live better. Some extra dollars with Google’s bells and whistles. AdWords cheat sheet & web traffic conversion cheat sheet.

Part 8: The most important questions answered.

Part 9: Improving your world.

Part 10: More help with your campaigns. Tools & resources from Perry Marshal. Confessions of a millionaire marketer.

What’s missing and what could be improved?

Perry Marshal’s “Definitive Guide To AdWords” is a great product, but it’s not perfect. In my opinion, certain topics are either missing or should have been discussed a bit more in-depth:

* Techniques and ideas to automate and speed up the often tedious process of campaign setup and management.

* Using Google Analytics to improve conversion rates and to fine-tune the lead generation- and sales process.

* A more in-depth discussion of the content network: How to get better conversions and lower click prices and some of the crucial differences in setting up a campaign- and writing ads for the content network.

But again, there isn’t a single product without any flaws. Each product has it’s strengths and weaknesses and the strengths of Perry Marshal’s “Definitive Guide to Google AdWords” by far outweigh the few weak spots mentioned above.

All in all, I’d say the “Definitive Guide To AdWords” is probably the most complete guide on Google AdWords, it’s easy to understand and follow and it teaches the fundamentals of how to succeed online with Google AdWords better than any other book on this topic.

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