How To: Manage your own Adwords

We’re a business that deals in Adwords… why on earth would we want to tell you how to manage it yourself!?

Simply put, many businesses just can’t afford to have someone else manage Adwords for them. Managing an Adwords account properly can be a very time consuming process to properly track, monitor, modify and report. This is why Adwords management can (sometimes) be an expensive venture.

This is especially true in the very early stages of business when there just isn’t any cash flow yet.

Now, we’ve taken over a lot of Adwords accounts that were previously self-managed. These accounts are almost always getting very low click through rates, have poor quality scores and are paying WAY too much per click.

Paying too much for ad clicks is very easy to do, so the Do-It-Yourself route is NOT for everybody. You must understand that if you don’t pay attention to what you are doing, you can slip up and waste money very quickly. If you go down this self managed route, please make sure that in the beginning you use a prepaid Adwords account, where you have to manually add balance using your credit card. At least this way, the risk is minimised.

Ok, with that out of the way, I want to share one of the best ways I have found to learn the basics of Adwords and apply it to your business.

It is a book by Perry Marshall, aptly named: “Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords“. It’s available as a digital Kindle download, or on paper.

You’ll want to have a highlighter or pen ready, so you can note down various numbers and bits of information which you can directly apply to your ads. This is why I love Kindle – as you are reading you can select pieces of text to highlight, and then access them all later online at kindle.amazon.com. This is seriously awesome.

If you apply the things you learn in this book, you’ll be ahead of most of the self managed AdWords guys out there.

It goes through everything from how to select keywords, how to bid, how many ads to make, and how to interpret the results. Even the best way to build an ad is covered – there are a lot of ways to write a 4 line ad which can make huge differences to your click through rate.

What I love about it is that it is so specific about everything, from processes down to exact numbers to aim for.

For $12.99 and a couple of reading hours, you don’t have much to lose. Grab it here.