Customer Reviews

Winning Results with Google AdWords, Second Edition

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The title implies that the book will be a how-to manual getting great results with Google AdWords. Not exactly. It does however provide great nuggets of information and helpful tips as well as great insight into how Google evaluates your AdWords campaigns - especially relative to Quality Score. It is up to date as well, as the strategies presented here are new - and many of them are being echoed elsewhere - such as starting campaigns with relatively few keywords and then expanding to the long tail once your quality scores are high. This is in stark contrast to the old way of doing things which involved going after the long tail right out of the starting gate with hundreds of keywords. Your quality score is likely to suffer these days with this old approach.

The book is however way too wordy and provides a lot of extraneous information for the online marketer who is looking to improve their campaigns. If you're already familiar with the industry and search in general, I would recommend skimming the first two chapters - especially chapter 2 - to find nuggets that would be helpful for what you are trying to do. For example, it is good to know just how often a user clicks on a sponsored ad as opposed to a paid listing - on page 22 (Chapter 1) Goodman mentions that Google staff have stated informally that this number can be 15% of the time or higher. Chapter 2 goes into history, which I found to be not so helpful. Chapter 12 was a look to the future which I also didn't get a whole lot out of. The middle chapters of the book were very good, although still too long.

Strengths:
* A lot of great tips
* Insight into how AdWords evaluates you and your campaign (direct quotes from Google spokespeople and inferred info from Google as well)

Weaknesses:
* Too Long and too Wordy - could do a better job at getting to the point. It takes a while to get through this book.

Overall:
I consider myself an Advanced AdWords advertiser - I found the book very helpful and would recommend it for intermediate AdWords users and above. I did learn techniques and approaches that I'll be able to apply to my online marketing. My only wish was that these nuggets of good information could have been accessed in a less lengthy book. Beginning AdWords users will likely find AdWords for Dummies more helpful.

Interesting book, provides a lot information regarding the story of adwords and how it became such a massive business. With regards to advise, good but a little too neutral

From the cover and title, I expected a rather low-end book, targeted at neophytes only. But I bought the book anyway (based on a strong recommendation from a peer) and was very pleased! Aside from the first few chapters (with many details about the history of search advertising), many chapters of this book are very helpful in getting up to speed on core, competent use of AdWords and similar tools.

The genius of Google AdWords come through in this insightful book. The complexity of the Google system is clearly explained and daunting in its permutations.

If you own a small -- or large -- business, you really have to come to terms with Google Adwords, and all of the advertising and marketing tools it puts in your hands. This book is a great place to get started, alone with materials on Google itself.

The book was dated! It really didn't give me any information about how to set up a successful adwords campaign. This book wasn't what I was looking for.

I was skeptical at first. How much can you write about adwords. But the book had plenty of points I never considered or thought were important.

There are some valuable tidbits for the novice here, but I have to force myself to wade through chapter after chapter to find practical useful info that I did not already know.