Richard Stokes - Ultimate Guide to Pay-Per-Click Advertising

This book guides you to build a quality campaign from the ground up to compete on the highest level.

Ping Jen, Product Manager, Bing Ads

The title of this book isnt pulling any punches; it really is the ultimate guide to pay-per-click advertising. Whether youre just getting started with PPC or if youre an old pro, this book is not only ultimate but it is also essential. Each chapter is filled with timeless information that can serve as the bedrock of your PPC campaign foundation. The strategies in this book will improve your PPC performance and ultimately grow your business. This content will deliver value for years to come. Your ROI on buying this book is off the charts!

Joseph Kerschbaum, Midwest Account Director, 3Q Digital

Brilliant insights. Advanced material. Dont think, just buy it. Rich is one of those guys that makes you sit up and listen closely. His knowledge of the data behind AdWords is quite literally unparalleled. (Outside a few people in Google. Maybe.) He digs in deep and makes you smirk in awe at the clever ways all that data can help you improve your account. A must read.

Mike Rhodes, CEO, WebSavvy.com.au

Just buy this one. Stokes writes the one PPC book to own in 2014. Great for beginners, required reading for those in the know. Up-to-the-moment fresh for 2014.

Rob Sieracki, Co-founder, Ox Optimal PPC Consultancy

Since reading Ultimate Guide to Pay-Per-Click Advertising I no longer feel Im at the foot of an impossibly long learning curve. This book reveals the inner workings of the search ad networks without using tea leaves and crystal balls. Instead, it focuses on the few strategic metrics that make a difference, and backs them up with valid data from real campaigns. Its the first book Ive read that made me feel I could take data-driven action to improve my search advertising campaigns. Most importantly, I now know something that other search marketers dont, and that gives me the edge in this competitive ad marketplace.

Brian Massey, Author of Your Customer Creation Equation

If you or anyone on your team needs to learn or get refreshed with the fundamentals of paid search marketing, this is the book for you. Clean, simple, and very actionable.

Rob Griffin, EVP, Havas Media

Rich Stokes has turned mountains of data into meaningful and actionable insights into how Search Engine Marketing really works. This is required reading for any online marketer who wants to be in the 1 percent of successful Search Engine Marketers. With my eight years of experience in optimizing for Keyword Coverage and Impression Share, I know that what Richard says is right on the money and has led my own clients to realize 3X to 5X sales growth in a matter of months on mature campaigns that had been optimized and managed previously by other agencies.

Kevin Milani, VP of Digital Marketing, Virtual Marketing Staff LLC

Entrepreneur Press, Publisher

Cover Design: Andrew Welyczko

Production and Composition: Eliot House Productions

2014 by Entrepreneur Media, Inc.

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ebook ISBN: 978-1-61308-272-0

Dedicated to Kelly, Brendan, Brittain, and my latest conversion, Brooks

Contents

M any thanks go out to my contributors: Perry Marshall (author, Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords), Ping Jen (product manager, Bing Ads), Jon Rise (CEO, Rise Interactive), Noam Dorros, Matt Van Wagner of Find Me Faster, and Howie Jacobson (author, AdWords for Dummies) for their contributions. These are some of the finest search marketers in the world, and anyone interested in PPC advertising would do well to follow their advice closely.

This book would not be possible without the talented folks at AdGooroo. Its hard to believe it has been ten years. Thank you for an exciting decade.

I would like to acknowledge the wonderful people at Kantar Media, who had the vision to see a great thing and make it greater: Terry Kent, Amy Silverstein, Joel Pacheco, and Jeff Krentz.

I am also very grateful to the team at Entrepreneur Press for their vision and assistance during the preparation of this work.

Id like to express my thanks to Rick Carlson, CEO of Surf Secret, and Dave Gobel and Roger Holzberg, both executive members of the Methuselah Foundation, for sharing their marketing data with me for use in this book.

This book would not have been possible without the patience of my familyKelly, Brendan, Brittain, and Brooksthroughout many months of marathon writing sessions. And finally to my parents: Persistence paid off.

I f you want to win at pay-per-click today, you MUST know stuff everyone else doesnt know.

I have yet to have a single conversation with Richard Stokes that didnt reveal something fascinating.

Rich is a data geek in the best sense of the term, but hes more than that. He is fascinated, intrigued and absorbed in what it means , not just what it says .

I attribute this to the fact that Richard started out as an affiliate marketer ten years ago, buying ads on Google, selling products and living by his wits. As I recall, he quit his job when he started making north of $50,000 per month.

Well, the list of people in the world who have actually done that is not a very big one.

Now there is also a group of people in the world who make their living by studying gargantuan amounts of data and telling you what it means. This is also not a very big list of people.

But the number of people who have done all of the abovebeen a bootstrapping entrepreneur, wolverine marketer, and junkie of delicious datais absolutely tiny. Perhaps you can count them on one or two hands, and thats it.

Richard Stokes is one of those precious few.

And he is the only one whos writing books, freely sharing their discoveries.

And thats why I like Rich so much. Its why I had him speak at my Maui AdWords Elite Masters Summit two years in a row,;ee what might tumble out; its why so many Fortune 500 companies come to him and his company, AdGooroo, when they must decide how to optimally position themselves in the Google advertising landscape.

Outside the Googleplex, there may not be anyone else who knows more than Richard about how the Google AdWords algorithm actually works.

Add to that the fact that hes founded an impressive companyAdGooroo itself is a study in successful business buildingyou have all the makings of a great business book. If youre spending tens of thousands of dollars on clicks, youre not gonna want to put it down.

Warning: Pay-per-click is trickier than it looks. As Richard says, just 1 percent of Googles advertisers generate 80 percent of Googles paid search revenue. It has become one of those things that can be made to appear very simple and easy but in reality demands well-honed chops, close attention to trends, and a good bit of art and intuition.