For the longest time I loved to play strategy games, I still do. The thing is, I love being able to beat someone by being smarter than they are, or should I say, "leet." :)

I would play a game for sometimes 8 hours a day, I was addicted. I had to be the best. If someone beat me, I always wanted a re-match. I just couldn't stand being beat, it would make me angry. Some say that's a sign of a sore loser, but to be quite honest, I love a tough opponent. Nothing bores me more than a lousy opponent, where's the fun?

I wasn't afraid to steal someones tactic, improve on it and make it my own. No reason to re-invent the wheel, if it works use it! Some of my greatest knowledge comes from other peoples experiences and not my own.

I played every PC strategy game that emerged on the market for about 15 years straight. I lost a lot of girlfriends and a lot of sleep during this time, but I came out of it with several abilities that have been key to succeeding in the field of internet marketing. I learned how to,

 

• Read my opponent/competition
• Learn from things that didn't work and use the knowledge to get better
• Find workarounds for tough situations

 

I started to get fed up with the whole PC gaming industry because I knew that if a hack came out for a game then my opponents probably had it and unless I got it I was at a disadvantage. The game was ruined. Games that used to last months or years now lasted weeks, and the whole strategy part lost it's luster.

I became so engrossed with winning that I would use every resource at my disposal to win. This led me into the world of hacks and cheats. I would find a hack for a game I liked and then go abuse it as much as I could to gain an advantage. Needless to say this led to many account suspensions and a lot of really boring games. I couldn't help it, if it helped me win I used it, period.

I needed something new, a new addiction that brought out my true competitive side.

PPC marketing was born. Granted I had no idea what that was, it was waiting for me to find it.

I was hanging off the side of a house installing shutters in 100 degree weather as a part-time job when it found me. The contractor I was working for knew I was somewhat computer savvy and had a friend that was looking for someone to help out with web-design. By this time I had built probably 30 websites for friends of mine and a couple large sites for businesses as part of a development team, nothing extraordinary. I had never heard of PPC marketing at this point, but I had seen the ads and they bothered me. I hated them, every ad I clicked on led me to junk I never wanted. The ads looked so promising but rarely ever were about what I wanted. I took this hate with me right smack into the complex yet exciting world of Internet marketing.

I hit the ground running and never looked back, I had found it! More addicting than any video game I ever played, and I was geting paid to do it. Wow!

But like every game I had played, exploits always surfaced. I was again faced with the temptation to cheat to get ahead. I found loopholes and tricks right off the bat. But unlike game creators that give up on patching old games to fix these exploits, search engines don't.

I felt the backlash of this pretty heavily as some of my sites got dropped from the search engines index. I had to re-think the game. Then one day it came to me as I was reading Google's advertising Policies, by doing what I had been doing I was only hurting myself in the long run. I was in it for the long haul now, I had to win without cheating. I was going back to the basics.

I decided to learn everything I could about online advertising, I wanted to be the best because I was the best and not because I cheated. It was back again! I felt my competitive side kick back in like never before, good clean fun.

Some of you may be wondering why I'm sharing this with you, what does this have to do with Google Adwords? Well, a lot.

Search engines have rules for 1 reason. They want happy searchers, without them they would be out of business, advertisers would stop advertising and people wouldn't find what they were looking for.

Google Adwords has eaten up countless hours of my existence. Google adwords is probably the most fascinating thing I've learned to master, and when I say master I refer to having mastered the art of  learning and re-learning again and again without ever reaching enlightenment, and not getting frustrated.

The secret to a successful Google Adwords management program is patience and flexibility. Nothing stays the same for very long.

 

Search engines are constantly changing and evolving to better serve the needs of the average daily user.

 

When it comes to search engines, the race is to deliver the most relevant content possible to searchers day in and day out. Every search performed is data gathered, tracked and processed by search engines for better end-user results, better relevancy an overall happier client.

As soon as I got past trying to "beat" or "crack" the search engine secrets and focused primarily on helping people find exactly what I had to offer, it all started to make sense. I learned things like CTR, Bounce Rate, Split-testing, Targeting and Keyword Optimization. Winning in this game all comes down to the ultimate goal of internet marketing, Return On Investment.

Throughout this book you'll hear me refer to Return On Investment as ROI, I will also append a glossary of terms for your reference.

ROI, it's what every marketing departmen wants a lot of; a good financial return on an investment, regardless of what medium the money is spent through.

Radio/Television/Internet/Flyers/Banners/Mailings/Billboards.

The questions and fears remain the same.

 

• Should I spend more here?
• Should I cut costs here?
• How am I gonna know if this pays off?
• Have I wasted my money?
• Where did that sale come from?

 

These are questions that you'll ask yourself 100 times a day. Fortunately with internet marketing you have an advantage, you can track almost anything down to the user. Tracking is your friend. The better you track your advertising returns the more knowledgable you'll become about your customers, what they want and how they like to find it. This is the gold.

You should know your customers better than anyone, so you can make them happy and provide them with exactly what they're looking for.

In this chapter we are going to focus on learning how to get into your customers head. We're going to learn how to read minds. Yes, I said it. Reading your customer is the most valuable thing you can do to generate the highest ROI.

Let's say I'm a high school student and I like video games. I'm in the market for a good strategy game to play. I'm tired of all the games I've been playing for years and I'm going to go search for a new and exciting game to play.

Where would I start? The browser. I either,

 

• A. Know a website that sells games and I go straight there or,
• B. Use a search engine to find what I'm looking for.

 

Knowing me I would go to google and type "new strategy games" and hope to god someone has a site listing all the new strategy games. I don't want to wade through all the crap, I just want a list of strategy games with descriptions so I can get on with researching which game to buy. But there's something missing in my search. The results are showing nothing but XBOX strategy games and I have a PC. I need to refine my search. "New PC Strategy Games" would be my next bet.

I have now found a site with a list of new PC Strategy Games, but now I have to read through all these reviews and descriptions so I can find a game I like.

These are key moments in making conversions, the customer is hungry and you need to feed them. But how are you going to do that?

Tell them what they want to hear. That's secret! They already want it, you just have to agree with them and present them with an option, not just any option, but the best option.

This is where tracking comes into play.

 

• Which searches yield the most sales?
• What keywords yield the highest CTR (Click-Through Rate)
• What ads grab the audience?
• What time of the day/week yields the highest ROI?

 

This is the art and benefit of tracking and analyzing. Why is it so valuable? Well, we learn about our customers. They know best! The sooner we realize this vital piece of information, the more money we will generate, and the happier our customers will be. Search engines want people to find your product. It's that simple! If you sell, you keep bidding on keywords and the more they make. Google is here to help you make money, all you have to do is use them as a tool, but use them right.