Google Advertising Tools, 2nd Edition

Preface

In the five years since the first edition of Google Advertising Tools was published, Google tools for making money from content with advertising (Google AdSense) and for creating contextual advertisements (Google AdWords) have become even more important to every business with a web presence. This software is now ubiquitous in the life of anyone doing business on the Web. In addition, these programs and the related Google offerings have greatly expanded in functionality and complexity.

In the first edition of Google Advertising Tools, I noted that “advertising on the Web is a $7 billion market…with a 40 percent estimated annual growth rate.” Give or take a few percentage points, this growth prediction has proven accurate, and the lion’s share of it belongs to Google. But no one could have known the extent to which Google has expanded into other areas of our lives, from video to office applications to mobile telephony and beyond.

Five years is forever in Internet time, and in those intervening years the Google AdSense and Google AdWords tools have grown even more useful and powerful—and more complex. The need to understand Google’s advertising tools has also become more universal.

Every business and businessperson needs to know how to position advertising with AdWords, and should consider how to capitalize on the moneymaking potential of AdSense. Effective use of both programs requires a practical mastery of a number of related issues, including how to create an effective Internet marketing plan, implement Search Engine Optimization (SEO), understand the structure of search, and track results using programs such as Google Analytics. Besides covering AdSense and AdWords, this revision of Google Advertising Tools explains these topics.

Google Advertising Tools has been rewritten to take into account changes and advances in the software, as well as the different needs of our times.

The first edition of Google Advertising Tools explained how to write code that takes advantage of the Google APIs. However, this kind of programming has become a specialized arena that no longer belongs in a book aimed at the general business public. Therefore, this material has been omitted from the revised edition.

At the same time, the AdSense and AdWords programs have grown to include so many features that they can seem downright intimidating to someone coming to the programs for the first time. Don’t worry: I’ll help you host your first AdSense ads and launch your first AdWords campaigns easily and without fuss. More advanced users will find the explanations of many potentially confusing bells and whistles helpful.

By the way, Google is constantly improving the features and user interfaces of its advertising tools (as is true of many web-based applications). So, by the time you read this book, the way these applications look may be a little different than they do here. But don’t worry: the core functionality will not have changed, and you should be able to use the directions in this book without any significant problems.

My focus in Google Advertising Tools is to help you run your business—whether it is large or small—in a more profitable way though effective use of Google’s advertising software.

Organization

This book is organized into three parts, with each part containing a number of chapters. Taken as a whole, these parts cover the gamut of the Google advertising tools. However, each part can be read as a self-contained unit, and each part is aimed at readers with different needs.

• Part I, Chapters 1 through 7, explains how to create a successful website, how to create a marketing plan, how to drive traffic to a website, the nuts and bolts of SEO, how to make money from a content-based website, how to build a site that will get traffic, how to get your site noticed, and the many ways to make money with advertising on your site.

• Part II, Chapters 8 and 9, explains how to work with Google’s AdSense, the premier contextual advertising program for content sites. Participating in the AdSense program is probably one of the best ways to monetize your site.

• Part III, Chapters 10 through 14, explains the nuts and bolts, and metrics, of the Google AdWords program, a highly successful mechanism that anybody with a valid credit card can use to place advertisements that reach over 80 percent of users of the Internet. I’ve added chapters that cover how to improve AdWords performance, AdWords tactics and strategies, and how to monitor performance. A final chapter explains AdWords programs that go far beyond contextual text ads.

If you read all three parts, you will get a comprehensive picture of how advertising works on the Web and how you can use the Google advertising programs to your advantage.