The $10M Google Ads Playbook

It’s been about 12 years since I first heard of something called Google Adwords.

A friend asked whether I could create some ads for his software tool. He asked me because I’d studied marketing so he figured I must know a little bit more about it than he did.

In reality, I didn’t. But I managed to set up campaigns, get some clicks to his website, and get him a bill of around $400.

He didn’t sell any extra software because of it. And I’m pretty sure I made every mistake in the book. But he was happy with the website visitors, I was happy to get some experience. (And I’m sure Google was happy as well!)

A couple of years later I was working as a marketing consultant, and one time a client asked me whether I could help them out with their Search Ads campaigns.

Not wanting to admit I didn’t really know what I was doing (and not mentioning my earlier attempts), I said: “Sure, I’ll have a look”.

When I opened up their ad account for the first time, I was pretty excited, but also a little terrified.

Here was this big company that was spending thousands of $ on ads every month, and sometimes even paying a couple of dollars per click (I thought they were crazy for wasting so much money at the time).

And they wanted me to help out.

It was obvious I was in a little over my head.

So I started reading books, attending conferences, got my Google Ads certification, and even managed to get myself invited to the Google office in Brussels for advanced training.

And those things helped.

Step by step, I was now able to look at that same client’s account, understand what was going on, and even make some changes that improved the results.

But I was far from confident.

That only came after doing the work.

In the 8 years that followed, I worked with hundreds of different ecommerce businesses all around the world. All selling different products in different markets with different economics.

And over time, most of the campaigns I managed did ok, some did REALLY well, and a few absolutely failed.

If you have a client that is trusting you with their hard-earned profits and you fail to generate enough in sales to cover the cost of the product, things can get pretty stressful.

So every time that happened, I tried to get to the bottom of it. Why did this happen? What could be some alternative approaches I could try in the future?

And bit by bit, I started improving my process, something that continued to this day.

That process enables me to know exactly what to do in each stage of a campaign, what tactics to try, and which metrics to focus on.

The goal of this story is to tell you that you’re not going to become a Google Ads expert overnight, nor should you.

There are no secret strategies, weird settings, or clever hacks that allow you to instantly go from 0 to insane profits.

But if you have the right input, do the work and be patient, you can get great results.

While I can’t help you with the patience part, I can help you by providing the right inputs.

So what you are about to see is all of that knowledge and experience distilled to its essence.

I break down what you need to know about Google Search Ads in a way that I’ve tested to be easy to understand and apply to your own campaigns.