I work for an online marketing company during the day, and in the evenings I'm trying to get a small PPC Campaign Management company rolling. Basically I don't intend to make any substantial money from it, maybe just get to learn the ins and outs of Adwords and Yahoo and make a few bucks on the side. So, I passed the Adwords Pro test, passed the Yahoo Ambassador test, and now I'm ready to roll. I've actually managed to get a couple of customers to let me manage their accounts, and now I'm at the point where I don't know what to do! I'm a very good writer, so I'm working on optimizing their ad texts, but this really leads to my questions.
1. Can anyone recommend any good books I can read that will give me some advanced knowledge of Adwords? I understand the basics, but wouldn't mind a book that covers everything from the basics to the most advance. Any ideas?
2. Also, I'm starting to realize that manually managing these accounts probably isn't going to be the best way of doing this long term. I already have a customer that wants me to manage a massive campaign for the shopping season, with a few thousand keywords, a whole mess of ad groups, etc. SO, can anyone recommend a good application I can buy/lease to be able to manage all of this a little easier? I've seen a lot of applications and services I can buy or pay monthly for, but does anyone have any experience with these, or any feedback? I suppose I could use Excel to help build 1000 adgroups or whatever, but that doesnt seem practical. Please help! :)
we've been using a third party bid-management tool from a company called Performics.
Its not the most advanced on the market, however, for the stage we are at, it is fine. Also, some of the features lined up for 2006 look great and will be ready at around the same point that we would be looking to advance our PPC strategy.
In choosing a tool, you need to look at the costs involved and see whether the savings that you'd make by implementing the tool (and there would be savings made) would, at the very least, cover the cost of running the tool.
Compatibility with your ROI tracking methods is also an obvious must.
Also, service and system availability (ie, no downtime!) is important. These tools are complex and require some levels of close monitoring initially as they get off the ground.
The main thing is that in implementing a tool, you will generally bypass direct login to the Google data centres etc - so again, you'd need to train staff and be trained yourself - this is where service levels offered by the suppliers would come into play.
The levels of granular detail that you can get by just a couple of clicks is amazing and provides some great insight into consumer activity - especially if you are tracking this back to ROI (either through Google tracking links or other)
As for books, there aren't many Google-specific books on the market (check Amazon) - im not sure whether these would provide the level of advanced knowledge that you are after. The Google Adwords pro-centre is useful, as would be the Google Ad-Words Progessional (GAP) qualification.
Hope this helps!
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[edited by: eWhisper at 1:39 pm (utc) on Nov. 9, 2005]
[edit reason] Please don't drop links. See TOS. [/edit]
