Google AdWords™ For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Where to Go from Here

We're thinking that a nice bowl of gazpacho would be nice right about now. Fresh Roma tomatoes; cilantro; onions; some cumin; and maybe a few chunks of cucumber, sweet corn, and avocado floating on top. Wanna join us?

You can start reading wherever you want, but we'd like to point out a couple of fundamental chapters that you will want to understand fully before spending money on AdWords. Chapter 1 gives you the direct marketing mindset you need to use AdWords effectively, and Chapters 4 and 5 guide you to a quantitative and qualitative understanding of your market. Chapter 6 shows you how to set up conversion tracking, and is absolutely critical to your success.

If we might be permitted to impersonate self-help gurus for a couple of paragraphs, here's where we want to encourage you to take imperfect action sooner rather than waiting to understand everything perfectly. You'll progress faster by implementing AdWords in bite-sized chunks than by reading the whole book and then trying to do everything at once. Don't expect perfection, either. There's no such thing in AdWords.

In Part II, we offer some guidelines that can minimize your risk. Read that part carefully, and then pick your favorite chapter to implement with some safety measures in place. If you don't succeed, learn from your mistakes and try again knowing full well that your mistakes are probably going to be far less costly than the ones we made when each of us started nearly a decade ago with little ...