Quickstart Guide to Google AdWords
Thu, Feb 14 2008

By Jonathan Oxer, IVT Technical Director

In the last eBusiness News I talked about Google AdWords and offered to send readers the last couple of copies I had of "Insiders Guide to Google AdWords", a simple little booklet produced by Google that explains some of the basics of the AdWords program. The response was amazing: the copies I had available were claimed within five minutes of sending out eBusiness News, and I ended up with a spreadsheet of people who wanted copies but missed out.

"No problem," I thought, "I'll just get on the horn to the Google AdWords marketing team and grab some more copies. A box or two should do it."

No such luck. It turns out that they are out of print, and the AdWords marketing team has no intention of producing more - which is a pity, because it's a very useful little guide that would help a lot of people get started with AdWords.

Oh well, since I talk to a lot of people about eBusiness and many of them want to try out AdWords, perhaps I could arrange to have extra copies printed myself at my expense if Google didn't have plans to produce more?

"Absolutely not. That guide is Google copyright material and nobody else may reproduce it under any circumstances."

Wow. So they don't want me helping to advertise their services and send them more customers by reproducing what is effectively their marketing material for them at my expense? OK, I can understand them wanting to protect their corporate image, but still!

That left me in a pickle. Many of my customers are begging me for a quickstart guide to AdWords, but Google won't let me use theirs. What's a guy to do?

Write one myself, of course!

So over the last couple of weeks I've spent many late evenings writing "Quickstart Guide to Google AdWords", and it's in the final prepress stages right now - the cover has been designed, the internal artwork is being laid out, and it looks really cool. It's being published by Lulu Press and will be going to print in about 4 weeks, and a couple of weeks after that you'll be able to buy it from Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble, and good bookstores everywhere.

It's not a big book because I didn't want to waste readers time or fill it with technical fluff, so it's as direct and concise as I could make it: 60+ pages that take you step by step from starting off with Google AdWords for the very first time all the way through to split testing and analysing and optimising multiple simultaneous ad campaigns. It explains the difference between the "search network" and the "content network", the psychological differences between users on the networks, how to put multiple ads up against each other to see which performs better, how to check the popularity of different keywords before you create your ads, and how to understand the sometimes cryptic entries that Google puts in your AdWords bills.

The whole point of the book is to take readers from marketing-zero to AdWords Hero in less than 60 minutes.

Some time in the next few days the ISBN will be issued and the book site (www.adwords-quickstart.com) will be updated with pricing and order information.

Stay tuned!