Review: AdSense Code Cracker

Today we take a look at AdSense Code Cracker, a relatively cheap ($27) ebook that is good value but isn't at all what you think it's about.

AdSense Code Cracker: Where's the AdSense?

Let's call a spade a spade. AdSense Code Cracker is deceptively-named. There is nothing in this book about AdSense. It's actually an AdWords primer in disguise.

Imagine my surprise when I bought the book and discovered this. Yes, I expected some coverage of AdWords, but I though it would be an AdSense arbitrage book like AdSense Arbitrage and Leveraging. But it's not. It has a lot more in common with other AdWords ebooks I've reviewed here, including AdWords Miracle, Beating AdWords and Google Wealth Wizard. (If you missed my reviews, you can read them all from my AdWords book review roundup page.)

What you actually get is an 85-page book showing you how to advertise with AdWords. There's a few pages at the beginning about selling ClickBank affiliate products, but after that the book is all about AdWords. It goes through everything in quite some detail, so if you're looking for a newbie's guide to AdWords then this book is decent value compared to the others. He even explores some corners of AdWords that I really haven't played much with, such as the tools for mass movement of keywords between ad groups — an easy way to grab inactive keywords and move them into new ad groups where the ad text and landing page relevancy (you have to do that part, the tool just moves the keywords) will reactivate the keywords.

This book in particular advocates the creation of massive lists of keywords for doing long tail bidding at low keyword prices. This is contrary to the advice you'll see in the other books, which tell you to create small groups of tightly-focused keywords. I suspect the truth is that both ways will work depending on what variables you're dealing with.

For example, my own AdWords account is in such a pooched state these days that I have to work really hard to get a decent quality score for my ads — I should really start fresh with a new account. I did a quick test with a very large keyword list and most of my keywords were inactive because my minimum bids for them were $12 each! So there's no way I can bid $0.05 per keyword in order to apply this book's method. But someone starting fresh with a new AdWords account won't face those hurdles, I think. I really should try this again with a different account.

I should point out that this book is far from perfect and could use some editing. At least one of the sample ads it uses as an example has text that is too long to fit the AdWords character limits, which is a very poor thing to do in an AdWords book. (Google Wealth Wizard had that same problem.) And the section on writing compelling ad copy is very short and doesn't go into that much detail — and, frankly, that's the hardest part for most people, I think.

Oh, and the “formula” for making massive profits with AdWords is not disclosed until page 80 or so in the book, and it's nothing earth-shattering.

It's too bad the book is named the way it is. Yes, I suppose if you can send lots of traffic to your AdSense sites and pay no more than $0.05 per click you'll have high AdSense earnings — that's the whole point of arbitrage. But that's not what the book's about. It's an AdWords primer, pure and simple.

AdSense Code Cracker sells for $27.

Sponsored Link: Learn more about the ins and outs of
AdSense by reading Uncommon AdSense, my latest book about AdSense.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

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