PPC Book Review: PPC SEM An Hour A Day

ppc an hour a dayOne of my favorite books for new PPC pros is Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing An Hour a Day by two of my favorite PPC people, David Szetela and Joe Kerschbaum. The format of the book literally takes the reader on a 9-month journey to learn all the ins and outs of PPC – in just one hour per day.

Published in 2010, you may think the book is totally outdated by now. And if you look at it on the surface, it is. But I still recommend PPC An Hour A Day to novice PPC’ers, because the fundamentals haven’t changed in the 14 years I’ve been doing PPC. Keyword research is still keyword research. Good ad copy is still good ad copy. Good landing pages are still good landing pages. Sure, the screen shots may not look like what you’re seeing, but if you look past that, you’ll learn how to do PPC the right way by reading this book.

The first three chapters of the book cover PPC fundamentals: the art and science of PPC, how PPC works, and core PPC skills and objectives. These chapters are a sort of “required reading” prerequisite for the meat of the book, which is the “hour a day part.” Readers will need to devote the time to read about 50 pages before they jump into any real PPC work. And that’s a good thing – PPC is so complex these days that it’s risky to just start running campaigns without any background knowledge.

Once you finish the first 3 chapters, then the “hour a day” work begins. I love the progression of the book: it starts with keywords, ad copy, and landing pages, which are the building blocks of a successful PPC campaign. From there, it moves into optimization, Microsoft, and Adwords Editor.

The book is Adwords-first, meaning it teaches you the concepts in Adwords, and then moves to other engines. This approach makes sense, since Adwords is the standard-bearer for the PPC industry. It’s often easier to launch campaigns in Adwords, and then import them to Bing Ads.

Probably the only section of the book that’s truly outdated is the chapter on Microsoft’s Bing Ads. It wasn’t even called Bing Ads when the book was written – it was still Microsoft adCenter. Most of the differences between the old adCenter and Adwords mentioned in the book have been brought to parity by the Bing Ads engineering team, so you’ll have fewer gyrations to go through when importing your campaigns.

The book also covers YSM, which doesn’t exist anymore. Sure, there is Yahoo Gemini, but it’s quite different from the old YSM, and not as widely used. I still recommend reviewing these chapters, as there is a lot you can get out of the Microsoft chapter in particular.

All in all, PPC SEM An Hour a Day is a book that stands up over time. The fundamentals are there, broken out into digestible chunks that anyone can master. And if you’re working through the book and have questions, remember there’s always PPCChat on Twitter. ! Come ask us about anything you read that’s confusing – we’re here to help!

You can find PPC SEM An Hour a Day on Amazon. Check it out and let me know what you think!

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