The Complete Google AdWords and YouTube Advertising Book
Would you consider reading this book if you want your experience with Google Ads and YouTube advertising to be easier than mine was?
When I first started using Google Ads in 2011 to promote my website and business online, I made nearly every mistake possible. I spent thousands of dollars paying for clicks that did not help my business and invested hundreds of hours working on campaigns that produced very little value. Just when I finally started to understand what I was doing and began seeing a positive return on investment, my account was suspended. That early experience was frustrating, expensive, and humbling, but it also gave me the foundation that eventually helped me understand advertising far better than if everything had worked perfectly from the beginning.
By 2012, I started managing Google Ads campaigns for clients based on what I had learned through my own failures. Strangely enough, running ads for other people often turned out to be easier than running them for myself. That experience encouraged me to experiment with a new approach that included YouTube advertising, which at the time was managed inside Google Ads as video campaigns. What began as another experiment eventually became one of the most powerful assets in my business.
YouTube is now the center of my online presence, and advertising on the platform helped me build relationships with viewers who might only have watched a single video at first. Four years after my first Google Ads account was suspended, I gathered enough courage to try advertising again with a new website and a new business model focused on selling online courses. From the very beginning I was able to generate sales for about $20 in advertising spend. With continued testing and optimization, those numbers improved to around $5 per sale using display ads and about $8 per sale using search ads.
When those advertising results combined with higher rankings on Udemy and the organic traffic created by students sharing my courses, Google Ads became part of a system that eventually produced millions of dollars in course sales. That sounds impressive, and I admit that part of me enjoys telling that story because it makes me look smart. Still, it is only half of the truth. The reality behind those numbers was a system that worked extremely well but also lived dangerously close to the limits of what the platforms allowed.
At the peak of that system, my courses were a dominant presence on Udemy with more than 170,000 students enrolled. My advertising budget approached $1,000 per day, producing thousands of clicks daily from nearly every country in the world. I built an affiliate remarketing strategy that operated right along the edge of the rules. Someone searching for "Udemy" might first see my instructor course without an affiliate link, and then later see remarketing ads that brought them back to Udemy through an affiliate link while also promoting my courses with discounted coupons. With so many students enrolling in my courses, I was even able to track affiliate conversions inside Google Ads and continually expand my reach across Udemy's student base.
My hope is that by sharing both the successes and the failures of my Google Ads journey, you will be able to navigate your own path with more clarity and far fewer painful mistakes than I made. One part of my system that still works extremely well today is YouTube remarketing, which continues to help me reach viewers and grow my business at scale.
Thank you very much for reading this. I hope the lessons I learned through years of experimenting with Google Ads are useful to you today.
Sincerely,
Jerry Banfield
Customer Reviews
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