Essential Adwords: The Quick And Dirty Guide Review
Go here for original audio version of this review on Soundcloud. The following is a transcript:
Hey guys. Sam here again with another review. It’s just gonna be a really short one today. I’ve been reviewing a lot of products like software services, installable software, those kind of things. One thing I want to branch at into doing is some shorter reviews looking at sort of business development and training, Kindle books, and other Ebooks and maybe print books that I’ve been reading. I’m a firm believer in reading a bunch of, you know, books and … I mean, I use a Kindle myself. I haven’t read a print book really in a long time, but I do read the occasional one.
Yeah, basically what I want to do is start, I guess, yeah, reviewing books, training books and guide books and all those kind of things that I’ve been working with, or reading I should say. The first one I want to cover is something called, Essential AdWords: The Quick and Dirty Guide. The Kindle edition of this by a guy called, Kyle Sulerud. Sorry if I’ve pronounced your name incorrectly there. But, yeah, I’ve been following Kyle’s sort of AdWords Training for a while now. He’s got a, like a high-end AdWords Training course that I’m hoping to buy at some stage. I think he closed the access to it recently. It’s about a $1000 course. You know, it’s obviously a pretty nation, it’s really focused at creating effective AdWords campaigns for local services, businesses, you know, and then getting really good conversion rates and basically giving local-service clients a good ROIN and sort of trying to create a business, I guess, out of providing AdWords Management to local service businesses.
So I’ve been seeing, you know, he’s got a lot of promotions out on the Facebook news feed. He’s got an AdWords group, I believe. I’m a member of it. I’m trying to think if he’s the Ad Man or just a Moderator. Something like that. I’ll double check. But basically, I didn’t even know he had a cheap guide available. Someone had mentioned it in a comment on one of his posts on Facebook, that they’d purchased his Essential AdWords: The Quick and Dirty Guide on Kindle. I thought: Oh, I’ll give that a shot. Jumped over to Kindle and lo and behold, it was like 75% off, $2.00 or something like that was the price. I thought: I’ll buy it and just give it a quick read.
So look, all I’m gonna do is super briefly cover what it is, what I like about it, what I don’t, and is it worth reading. So, as the name suggests, Essential AdWords: The Quick and Dirty Guide is a basic guide to Google AdWords. Yeah, it’s a short Kindle Ebook, you know, you can probably read through the whole thing in about a half an hour. You know, it costs a few dollars, the price of a coffee or something like that. It just contains a whole list of, I guess, things you need to know to sort of, I suppose, have a good understanding of the basics of AdWords.
This is not a super-detailed complex guide. It’s not an in-depth strategy that, you know, you sort of boiler plate strategy you can apply to multiple clients or anything. It’s just giving you a grounding in the platform. Yeah, so what I’ll do I talk quickly about the things I like about it and the things I don’t and is it worth your time to actually go out and buy this and read it. So, the thing I like is that … it’s most of all is that it is really hard-hitting. It is short. I mean, two bucks I paid for it. Who cares how short it is?
Even if it was three or four pages long, as long as the information was good it’s worth a buy at that price. I pleased to say that the information that’s in there is really good. There’s a lot of very valuable insights that you can glean from this that if you did … I mean, I’ve been doing AdWords for a long time. But if you were new to AdWords and you didn’t know what Kyle was talking about, there’s a lot of settings he makes you aware of, and sort of things you need to know about the platform that if you get them wrong you can blow through a lot of money quickly. You can run campaigns that aren’t particularly effective.
Basically, I think his goal with this Quick and Dirty Guide to AdWords is to provide you with, I guess, enough information to be dangerous or perhaps I should say enough information to not make massive stuff-ups with your AdWords account that’ll cost you or your client loads of money. So, he covers all sorts of things like network settings and what are the different campaign types and what are they good for. How to get into the right mindset with keywords. That’s a really valuable section, actually, you know? How to think like potential customers are thinking so you pick good keywords.
He talks about negative keywords. And actually, a really interesting point that he raises here, and the more I think about it the more it’s true is he talks about the fact that really, you know, you can make or break a campaign on negative keywords. A lot of people don’t think enough about negative keywords that they, you know, that they don’t use enough of them. But if you’re smart with AdWords and really master the art of negative keywords and avoiding your ads showing for search terms that aren’t relevant or are going to lead to clicks that generate conversions. You know, you do this by using negative keywords that you’ve either researched or you think would be appropriate or whatever. A master of negative keywords saves you a lot of money and improves results of the campaigns. It can really be the difference between a campaign that works well and one that’s a total failure.
He talks about conversion optimization. He talks about how to write ads. He talks about basic campaign settings you should know. And look, none of it is in huge detail or huge depth, but what’s there is actually really good and really hard-hitting. Certainly it’s, you know, what I’m gonna do is just come out and just say, hey look, this is, you know, buy this book. It’s worth buying simply for the fact that you can read it at lunch break probably at work or on the bus on the way to work or while you’re waiting for your plane to depart at the departure lounge or anything like that. Read it before you go to bed. You’ll get a really good grounding and basic settings you need to know about AdWords.
And more importantly, a few areas that you really need to be aware of to get good results. Basically, you know, picking good campaign settings; picking keywords that strike at the heart of what your target audience is looking for. And how to use negative keywords to avoid wasting money because that’s what you’ve got to remember. Every click on your ads doesn’t lead to a conversion or doesn’t lead to a positive brand and direction that turn into a conversion down the track. You know, it is wasted money. I’ve worked on AdWords accounts where … I mean, one I worked on, for example, the client was spending about $1000 a month on AdWords. Not a huge amount, but he was a small business. He had set it up himself because like a lot of small business owners, he didn’t want to pay. “Oh, I can do it myself.” He came to me and said: “Look, I’ve done it myself. I can’t understand why my AdWords account isn’t performing.”
He basically, he’d done only broad match keywords. Everything in the same ad group and the same campaign. He had display ad-on under search network, which is a terrible option. Of the last month, he’d been running that campaign. He spent $1000 and I was able to work out about $970 of that was spent on totally irrelevant clicks that had nothing at all to do with what he was selling. You know, if he’d read Kyle’s book, AdWords: The Quick and Dirty Guide, he probably would have avoided a few of those mistakes.
So, yeah, Essential AdWords: The Quick and Dirty Guide by Kyle Sulerud. Look, it’s not perfect. It’s really short; it’s basic. But the information is hard-hitting. It’s cheap. You can read it on Kindle. You don’t even need a Kindle. You can just read it on the web reader. I recommend checking it out. It’s well worth the buy. I can’t wait to have a look at his full-course one day.
Summary
Essential Adwords: The Quick And Dirty guide is a basic Kindle ebook designed to get you aware of important settings and features on Adwords. The goal of this short book is to ensure that when you set up your campaigns, you don’t make simple mistakes that can lead to wasting significant amounts of money. Although this isn’t the last word in Adwords training, it is nonetheless an excellent little guide with heaps of useful information. For a few dollars it is well worth buying.
Originally published at www.reviewsboss.com on January 5, 2018.
