Review of The Definitive Guide to Google AdWords by Perry Marshall

The Definitive Guide to Google AdWords, written by Perry Marshall, is a beginners’ course for learning pay per click Internet marketing strategy and the Google AdWords platform in particular. Because of Marshall’s reputation as a knowledgeable and trustworthy marketing coach and his step-by-step writing style, The Definitive Guide has become a favorite among beginning marketers. There are also many experienced marketers who have found The Definitive Guide helpful when they are trying to jumpstart a wilting campaign and continue to return to The Definitive Guide for strategy and technique tips.

The Definitive Guide is made up of over 200 pages full of Marshall’s marketing expertise written down in an easy-to-understand and simple-to-implement style. In the intro, Marshall provides a summary of the information contained in his book so that readers in a hurry can get started right away. This intro also includes a guide to starting a campaign — from picking a product, planning the release, and implementing the launch.

Marshall dives into the meat of his book with the topic of finding customers, a challenge many marketers face in the beginning of their career. The Definitive Guide shows marketers how to identify and contact the campaign’s target audience. In The Definitive Guide, Marshall focuses specifically on the importance of understanding what your audience is thinking. What are prospective customers talking about? Worrying about? Wishing for? Marshall proves his worth as a marketer by advising readers to spend time studying the chosen audience before starting any sort of advertising campaign, PPC or otherwise.

While many gurus focus entirely on what keywords and marketing techniques to use when employing Google AdWords for a campaign, Marshall’s insistence that an audience must be studied before it can be successfully marketed to shows he knows exactly what he’s talking about. The Definitive Guide covers this aspect of marketing first, reminding readers that a campaign’s audience is made up of real people, not robots looking for certain keywords. With this mindset established, The Definitive Guide goes on to explain the nitty-gritty of making PPC make money. Marshall writes about making each click worth more, using ad scheduling, and increasing the value of every site visitor.

Marshall is widely known as the top Google AdWords expert online today and he shares his insider knowledge in The Definitive Guide. Instead of just detailing the basics of the platform or explaining marketing technique, Marshall delves into the lesser known and lesser used aspects of Google AdWords. These under-appreciated aspects of Google AdWords that Marshall reveals the worth of include the Content Network and image ads.

Marshall ends The Definitive Guide with dozens of real-world examples of his own wildly successful PPC campaigns. This direct, undisputable proof of Marshall’s expertise is part of the reason The Definitive Guide is famous throughout the Internet and marketing communities as being exactly what its name suggests: a definitive guide to Google AdWords.