Books

Find the original sources, practical reading and people behind the collective. These links open the full public pages.

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• Books for paid media practitioners

  Explore books on advertising, strategy, creative work and measurement, with author credits and edition notes.

• A Marketer's Guide to Digital Advertising

  Explains digital advertising measurement and the supply chain. Useful for owners assessing partners, technology and what media reports can really show.

• Advanced Google AdWords

  A substantial historical AdWords manual on intent, copy, landing pages and optimisation. Useful for studying PPC reasoning, with 2014 instructions dated.

• Advertising Media Planning

  A cross-media reference on plans, budgets and channel choices. Useful for understanding planning foundations across traditional and early digital advertising.

• Alchemy

  Explores perceived value and unconventional marketing ideas. Useful when an agency's creative thinking has narrowed to predictable, purely rational arguments.

• All-Inclusive TV

  Makes the case for linear TV within a wider video mix, with data and accountability in view. Useful context when evaluating a proposed TV service.

• Better Brand Health

  A guide to choosing useful brand-health measures. Relevant when an agency needs to connect campaign reporting with a client's wider brand tracking.

• Building a Successful Micro-Agency

  The founders' approach to a small marketing agency, covering focus, demand, cashflow and margins. Useful for owners defining a sustainable operating model.

• Building Distinctive Brand Assets

  Explains how to build and protect recognisable brand elements. Useful when creative testing changes so much that the advertiser becomes harder to identify.

• Built to Sell

  Explores reducing a business's dependence on its founder. Useful for agency owners who remain central to every sale, delivery decision and client relationship.

• Causal Inference: The Mixtape

  A technical guide to separating cause from correlation. Useful for analysts assessing marketing impact when a straightforward experiment is unavailable.

• Conversion Optimization

  Connects conversion with customer needs, value propositions and usability. Useful when campaign traffic arrives but the website fails to make a convincing case.

• Creative Strategy and the Business of Design

  Connects business goals with creative briefs and design decisions. Useful for teams that need to explain why an idea serves the client's objective.

• Decoded

  Uses decision science to explain buying, perceived value and customer goals. Useful for developing a stronger rationale behind marketing touchpoints.

• Digital Marketing in an AI World

  A 2019 view of how PPC agencies adapt to AI and automation. Useful for tracing changing skills, human oversight and agency services.

• Digital Marketing Strategy

  An integrated planning guide for connecting paid search, display and social with customer experience, business goals and measurement.

• Experimentation Works

  Explains how leaders make experimentation part of everyday work. Useful for agencies building a testing programme that survives beyond isolated A/B tests.

• Facebook Ads Made Simple

  An introductory Facebook campaign guide organised around business goals. Useful for learning planning basics, with the 2018 instructions treated as historical.

• Good Strategy Bad Strategy

  Shows how diagnosis, a guiding policy and coordinated action form a strategy. Useful when an agency plan lists targets without explaining its choices.

• Google Ads (AdWords) Workbook

  A Google Ads workbook spanning Search, Display and YouTube. Useful for structured learning, with the checked 2024 instructions requiring current verification.

• Google ADS agile

  Gianpaolo Lorusso's Italian-language guide to reviewing Google Ads campaigns through the PPC CheckMate method: efficiency, effectiveness and budget coverage.

• Google Advertising Tools

  A historical guide spanning AdWords, website promotion and AdSense. Useful for distinguishing advertising-buying foundations from publisher monetisation.

• Google AdWords

  An early AdWords guide to account structure, keywords, budgets and tracking. Useful as historical PPC background, with 2011 operational instructions dated.

• Hacking the Human Mind

  Seventeen brand case studies explain behavioural science through familiar buying decisions. Useful for generating creative and landing-page test ideas.

• Het Schakelpunt by Geert Hidding: Focus and Action

  Recommended by Bob Meijer, Geert Hidding’s practical framework helps agency owners switch between long-term priorities and focused action. This is a general performance book, not a PPC tactics manual.

• Hey Whipple, Squeeze This

  A guide to advertising concepts, copywriting and storytelling. Useful for creative teams who need stronger ideas before producing more variations.

• How Brands Grow

  Examines buying patterns and the evidence behind brand growth. Useful for questioning audience and loyalty assumptions in a client's media strategy.

• How Brands Grow Part 2

  Extends the brand-growth research, including B2B markets in the revised edition. Useful for testing how a broad growth argument applies to different clients.

• Implementing Value Pricing

  Develops a services business model around customer value instead of hours. Useful for owners examining the wider changes a new pricing approach requires.

• Influence

  Explores persuasion, social proof and trust, with unity added in the expanded edition. Useful for improving how an offer helps customers decide.

• Inside Google Ads

  A focused guide to Google Ads audiences, remarketing and automated targeting. Useful for explaining when audience choices restrict reach or provide signals.

• Join or Die

  A PPC agency perspective on adapting to automation. Useful for reconsidering team skills, campaign decisions and the service clients pay an agency to provide.

• Landing Page Optimization

  A conversion reference on diagnosing page problems and organising tests. Useful for agencies connecting acquisition work with what visitors experience next.

• LinkedIn for Business

  A historical guide joining LinkedIn marketing, sales and advertising. Useful for studying how paid activity fits a wider B2B acquisition process.

• LinkedIn For Dummies

  A broad LinkedIn introduction with one advertising chapter. Useful for understanding the platform's wider business role before specialising in paid campaigns.

• Made to Stick

  Explains what makes ideas memorable through six communication principles. Useful for simplifying ads, landing pages and the story behind a complex offer.

• Madison Avenue Makeover

  An inside account of Huge's agency transformation. Useful for owners examining how pricing, organisation and client outcomes need to change together.

• Making Websites Win

  A customer-research-led approach to website conversion. Useful for agencies building a case for diagnosing the page before increasing media spend.

• Managing the Professional Service Firm

  Examines staffing, economics, leadership and client development in expert firms. Useful for agency owners balancing people, capacity and commercial performance.

• Marketing Effectiveness

  Connects media, creative, pricing and research with business results. Useful when a client's dashboard shows efficiency but does not explain growth.

• Marketing Metrics

  A reference connecting marketing measures with margins and customer profitability. Useful for aligning agency reports with the client's financial questions.

• Methods for Causal Inference in Marketing

  A technical research monograph on estimating marketing effects. Useful for measurement specialists assessing experimental and observational methods.

• Next Generation Retail

  Explores retail technology and business models, including monetising retailer traffic. Useful for judging the capabilities behind a retail-media opportunity.

• Obviously Awesome

  A positioning guide for clarifying who an offer serves, what makes it different and why buyers should care before you write ads or sales copy.

• Ogilvy on Advertising

  A historical perspective on advertising craft, research and agency life. Useful for revisiting the promise, evidence and selling idea behind an ad.

• Paid Attention

  Explores how brands compete for attention through ideas and communication. Useful for strategy discussions before committing to a media or creative approach.

• Ponderings of a PPC Professional

  PPC thinking on attribution, automation, keywords and agency decisions. Useful for questioning assumptions behind account management and client advice.

• Prediction Machines: summary for paid media owners

  Prediction Machines explains AI as cheaper prediction. Explore its value for agency owners, with the 2022 edition and a Mike Rhodes recommendation.

• Pricing Creativity

  Applies value-based pricing to proposals and negotiation. Useful for agency owners reviewing how they sell expertise; the author lists it as out of print.

• Profit First

  A behavioural approach to allocating business cash. Useful for owners building spending discipline, alongside proper accounting and financial analysis.

• Rethinking Retail

  Uses consumer research to examine changing shopping preferences and retail marketing. Useful context for planning retail-media work with clients.

• Sales Pitch

  An eight-step approach to turning product positioning into a sales narrative. Useful when an offer is clear but the presentation does not help buyers choose.

• Scientific Advertising

  A historical direct-response classic on claims, headlines, samples and testing. Useful for examining the selling logic behind modern creative briefs.

• Sell with Authority

  Connects focused expertise with useful, distinctive agency content. Relevant to owners who want their marketing to demonstrate what their firm knows.

• Social Media Marketing All-in-One For Dummies

  A broad introduction to social planning, content, communities and ads. Useful for generalists; its platform advertising sections are introductory.

• Stop the Scale

  Challenges growth for its own sake through client selection, retention and sustainable operations. Useful for owners deciding how big their agency should become.

• The AI-Amplified Marketer

  A guide to using generative AI in PPC analysis, creative work and workflows, with human judgement and business context at the centre.

• The Art of Client Service

  A practical guide to briefs, scope, budgets and client communication. Useful for training account managers and making service expectations explicit.

• The Attention Economy

  Examines attention measurement and data quality. Useful for evaluating media proposals that claim attention is a better guide than impressions or CPM.

• The Attention Economy and How Media Works

  Examines viewing conditions and advertising exposure. Useful for teams questioning whether impressions and viewability describe the attention an ad receives.

• The Beginner’s Guide to Google Ads

  A short introduction to basic paid-search campaigns. Useful for starting team training, with the book's exact edition details still unconfirmed.

• The Boutique

  Covers starting, scaling and selling a specialist services firm. Useful for agency founders choosing the next stage of their business.

• The Business of Expertise

  Examines specialisation, positioning and the business of selling advice. Useful for agency owners whose services appear interchangeable with competitors.

• The Choice Factory

  A guide to 25 buying biases with marketing applications. Useful as a shared reference for discussing offers, customer research and creative hypotheses.

• The Copywriter’s Handbook

  A practical reference for ads, landing pages, websites and email. Useful for writing clearer commercial copy and giving more precise feedback.

• The Definitive Guide to Google AdWords

  A historical manual linking AdWords campaigns with landing pages, analytics and testing. Useful for studying the full path from search to conversion.

• The Definitive Guide to YouTube Ads

  A YouTube advertising guide linking video creative, audiences, campaign design and profit measurement for teams planning a paid video service.

• The Four Conversations

  A practical model for selling expertise. Useful for owners improving qualification, value discussions and the conversations that lead to a proposal.

• The Future of Shopping

  A retail strategy book connecting customer journeys, retail media and AI. Useful when an ecommerce brief reaches beyond buying more traffic.

• The Illusion of Choice

  Behavioural research translated into marketing examples. Useful for developing new approaches to offers, creative briefs and customer decisions.

• The Long and the Short of It

  An advertising-effectiveness research publication on short- and long-term effects. Useful for discussing how activation and brand investment work together.

• The Power of Experiments

  Business and policy stories show how experiments inform decisions. Useful for leaders making the case for testing and discussing its limits.

• The Trusted Advisor

  Explores how professional advisers earn client trust and communicate well. Useful for owners who want stronger relationships around difficult decisions.

• The Win Without Pitching Manifesto

  Twelve principles for selling creative expertise. Useful for owners reconsidering unpaid pitches, specialisation and how they diagnose a client's problem.

• Trusted Advertising

  Explores trust in advertising across AI creative, influencers and media placement. Useful for agencies defining how they protect a client's reputation.

• Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments

  An A/B testing reference on metrics, guardrails and common pitfalls. Useful for teams that need reliable results before recommending a rollout.

• Ultimate Guide to Amazon Advertising

  A historical Amazon advertising guide linking ads with product pages and seller decisions. Useful for understanding the dependencies behind marketplace growth.

• Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising

  A historical Facebook advertising guide covering audiences, creative and the customer journey. Useful foundations, with the 2020 platform advice dated.

• Ultimate Guide to Google Ads

  A historical Google Ads campaign guide with mobile, local and network coverage. Useful for studying campaign foundations, with 2020 tactics clearly dated.

• Ultimate Guide to Instagram for Business

  An Instagram marketing guide covering content, audience development and funnels. Useful for connecting Stories and Reels with a wider commercial plan.

• Unlevel the Playing Field

  Explores how advertisers add oversight and controls around PPC automation. Useful for deciding where an agency can contribute beyond platform defaults.

• You vs. Google

  A practitioner guide to Google Ads setup, tracking and campaign management. Useful for mapping the work required to launch and maintain an account.