Can you learn AdWords and test your campaigns with $1,000?

Simply, the answer is Yes.

Here the assumption is you learn AdWords from scratch, and you'll have to do it yourself to setup your first campaign in AdWords.

The process is:

1 - Before you start, do some reading.

2 - Then start "doing" it - The practical part (i.e. "the doing") is a bit more complicated.

The reading part:

1. Read this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Google-AdWords-Brad-Geddes/dp/111881956X/

It's the best book on topic of AdWords.

2. Try to read most of Google's official AdWords help - Here.

The practical part:

3. Do a thorough keyword research.

Use a paid keyword suggestion/research tool that provides many good keywords, such as SEMRush (and/or a few other keyword tools).

If you aren't investing into keyword tools, then at least get your keywords through AdWords keyword tool, and Google's related searches (i.e. bottom of Google SERP).

4. Build a landing page to "catch" your AdWords traffic.

If you are to sell an affiliate product, that's fine - Put it on your landing page. Make sure you write some good content (including text, images, or even Youtube videos - if they can help with conversions).

Launch your site on Wordpress, with your own domain name, and use one of those landing pages builders such as Leadpages, ClickFunnels, etc.

5. Install Google Analytics on your website.

Link your Analytics account with your AdWords account. This gives you the power to use goal tracking as conversions for your AdWords account.

Or you can stay with conventional AdWords conversion tracking.

6. Start with "search campaign" (i.e. no display advertising), and keep monitoring the reports in AdWords.

You need to start somewhere in AdWords. Using keywords with Search campaigns to get the clicks, then "read" AdWords reports.

Start with reading the campaign reports, then keyword reports, then mobile/desktop reports, then geo reports, etc. Why reviewing all the reports? Because this is data analysis, and you need to continue doing this while running / managing your AdWords campaigns.

Regularly reading the new data in your report is a good practice to minimize your money burning casualty i.e. You may have overspent on certain clicks (or keywords), but because you're closely monitoring, the chance you see "something isn't right" will improve. And that's how to get the chance to make decisions and make changes to your campaigns - This is optimization.

If you have done your keyword research well enough, you can rely on only phrase match and exact match keywords in your AdWords. These match types can avoid a lot of unnecessary money burning.

The data reports from AdWords (and Analytics) let you figure out what keywords are burning you unnecessarily, and what keywords are good for conversions (or assisted conversions). Also, if you have already linked your AdWords account and your Google Analytics account, you will have more data in your reports, for example metrics such as bounce rate, etc.

Finally

When you finish burning through this $1,000 that you started with, you should have achieved 2 goals:

1 - Your understanding in managing an AdWords account have improved, quite a lot.

2 - You may already have seen a few conversions from your AdWords account for your website.

 

This seems to be really helpful.

 

Agreed, time is money and one needs to be free to make it as opposed to being tied up learning things that others can do better and faster.

 

Thanks this is really helpful for a beginner of PPC.