Which Perry Marshall Book?

Hi,

I've been pretty active on realestatewebmasters for awhile and now am really liking this forum as well. I have a pretty good understanding of Adwords just from reading the boards and using Adwords. I saw a couple mentions of Perry Marshall's book on here and it looked pretty good. I saw that there is "The Ultimate Guide" and "The Definitive Guide". Which book would be better to get and do I even need to read either of these books if I have a decent grasp on Adwords? Also, I saw seostew say something about some software that would tell you what the actual queries that triggered your ads were even when they weren't clicked but where can I get it. I tried using the Adwords query tool but it would just say "9 other queries" but not tell me the actual keywords. Okay, that's a long enough first post on this forum.

RyanR

Do you know who you are competing against??

If you think that you have a "pretty good understanding of Adwords"... that's enough to get your lunch eaten.

Think about how much those books cost compared to how much money you could make if you were "an Adwords EXPERT". Think about how little time it takes to read those books and compare that to a great vacation bought with all of your extra profits.

If you are workin' for The Man... then you can buy these books if you feel like it.... but if you are workin' for YOU AND YOURS... then you better buy BOTH of these books and other books and study them like your wallet is riding on it.

Are you out to make serious money or are you farting around?

Purchasing both books as we speak

Here are 4 Solutions. Some choices give more detail, but some are easier to set up.

Option 1: As you already discovered, in AdWords there is a new report in which you can see what query strings that triggered the ads, it is rarely the exact keywords you are bidding on, unless only bidding on exact match. It still doesn't show you everything as evidenced by the slot that will say "X number of unique queries," but it will give you the higher volume 2 - 4 word ones. Go the "Reports" section(for other's benefit) of AdWords and run a Search Query Performance at the adgroup level (assuming you have multiple ad groups which everyone should). This will only get you so far, because Google doesn't want to give you all the details. It is better than nothing, and more transparent than they used to be.

Option 2: Install LevelTen Hitcounter.
After installed correctly, go to the "Referrers" tab and use two drop downs at the bottom Show: "KW By All SE" and another drop down "All Type Show Type." This will only be of use if you tag all of your destination URLs of your ads, so you can tell the difference between ppc and organic. You start your tag off with a question mark after the destination URL (not display URL) then add information in which you can figure out what adgroup the ad came from (I don't go as far as to tagging the exact keyword, since most of my KWs in an adgroup are pretty close). It was prime in it's day, but don't expect this to give you a lot of graphs and whatnot. This is the main benefit of this free analytics software.

Tagging Example:
Campaign: United States
Adgroup: Web Design
keywords: custom website design, custom web site design
"custom website design," [custom website design]
Ad:

Custom Web Design
Award-Winning, Custom Web Design.
Starting at $2000. Free Quote!
www.webcompany/design

destination URL: http://www.webcompany?hct=GooglePPC_United_States_web_des ign

This is a not the best ad example, generic, I don't even advertise any web companies, but anyway.

The "hct=" triggers the hitcounter and you can see the raw query string. The words between underscores can be whatever you want them to be, but in order of where they came from:
The GooglePPC could be YahooPPC or MSNPPC, or Banner and you're paying a site owner to display..."SomeBannerSite." Then next comes the campaign, then the adgroup. Since I put very similar keywords in my adgroups, I don't go as far as using a separate tag for every keyword.

Option 3:If you already have Google Analytics, install the what that these guys made. It will require adding a JS document to your web files.
http://www.roirevolution.com/blog/2007/05/view_entire_referring_url_in_google_analytics_1.ht ml

Option 4: Look in your cpanel for all referring URLS. This only works if you tag your ads. This is the raw...raw data, that looks like mostly gibberish. If you look close, you can see exactly what a user typed in. You have to tag though for ppc-related. GarytheScubaGuy would know more about this than I.

You can use this to generate a tag
http://www.roirevolution.com/builder/ or this
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=27255

I like the first tag generator better because it is more logical in the hierarchy order. Tagging is a best practice either way if using more than Google PC. Google Analytics Auto tags, but it will not tag Yahoo PPC and you will not be able to tell what is organic or PPC.


I just options 1 & 2 right now. I am trying to figure out 3 and 4.

Definitely great info! Thanks guys for your input. I've downloaded hitcounter and I'm having some trouble installing it correctly. Hopefully I can figure it out. I've almost finished the Ultimate Guide book already.