1: Understanding the Paid Search Game

Download all of the slides from today’s lesson here:

[ddownload id=”136052″]

All other referenced bonus materials are available here:

PPC Mastery Course Bonus Materials

Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google, made $90 billion in 2016, with the majority of this revenue coming from little ads in search results. They grew 20% and show no signs of slowing down.

Google owns the US market share of paid clicks and does well all over the world.

Google is growing like crazy. The entire digital industry is growing like crazy.

There is so much opportunity to ride this growth wave for anyone looking to take it. This course is designed to help you grab your piece of the pie by learning exactly how you excel with Google AdWords.

How did we get here?

From 0 experience to $20 million in spend managed

When I started playing this game in 2005, I had no experience managing AdWords. In order to get experience, I started working for peanuts for a client who was willing to take a chance on me.

After producing good results, I started thinking about becoming Google certified. It took a while to manage the required $1,000 in spend, but eventually I got there and passed the Google test.

Then I set out for a new challenge – to get the company certified. This had challenges as well, including managing $100,000 in spend.

Eventually I hit that number and we became certified as a company.

From there we rolled from $100k to $1 million to $5 million to $20 million. We learned a lot along the way.

The video game corollary

I used to play a lot of video games. My favorite type of game were turned based strategy games. My favorite game was the Civilization series. I was really good at that game.

After a few months of managing AdWords campaigns, I realized that I was also good at getting results. It turns out that doing well at AdWords required the same skills as being good at strategy games.

You needed to optimize the results for every turn of the game. There are components that you can monitor, tweak and optimize. Then you move on to the next turn.

Managing AdWords is the same way. You have keywords, ads, campaigns, metrics and more. And you tweak them to get the best possible results. There is only so much you can do each turn, but the key to doing well is that level of management.

What we are learning in this course

It’s always a good idea to be clear about what we are learning in this class. You signed up for this course because you have expectations about what you expect to see from class. Let’s make sure they are aligned with what we are teaching.

• We are learning concepts, not absolute facts
• This game is always changing
• No specific clients, companies or people
• Not every single scenario you see can be covered in a video

This is not a product demo. Google gives that away for free at their AdWords Education Center.

But this will be an extremely insightful look into how you can use Google AdWords to increase sales for your business, open career prospects and take a piece of the advertising pie.

You will end this course with more knowledge than 99% of people who have used AdWords.

Use the Forum for Specific Questions

Our private forums are a place where everyone can learn together:

PPC Course Forums

Winning the AdWords Game

Here are some of the insights and rules of engagement that you can come to expect during class.

• Efficiency is key
• Google makes money through broad and automatic matching (i.e. inefficiency)
• Not every click is worth the money
• Not every business behaves the same way
• Understand your constraints
• Form a strategy for how to maximize your budget
• You don’t always have to be right to win
• Complexity kills
• Don’t be quick to automate
• You are only as good as your list
• You will screw up, own it
• I will screw up, I will own it
• Most Upcoming videos will be directly in AdWords
• Have fun
• Apply what you have learned
• You can watch the videos any time you want