Moving the Needle: Why We Bet on Performance, Not Prestige
In the agency world, especially in larger agencies, it’s important to brag about your big accounts. As a smaller agency serving small to midsized clients, and a few larger ones (but no Toyota or Netflix account over here!), we don’t play that game. Running huge accounts for already established brands is a skill in itself, […]
The Life, Death, and Eventual Rebirth of Google Ads Bid Adjustments
Bid Adjustments. They’re in there, lurking in the Google Ads platform, but now largely unused. Why? The Death of the Manual Lever Back in the day, advertisers manually decided on a Max Bid for each and every keyword, and beyond that, would tweak a number of other segments, again, all manually. With a dozen or […]
3 Patterns of Bad PPC Account Management We Didn’t Have on Our Bingo Card
Through live clinics, our own PPC audit offering, and other means, I’ve had the opportunity to assess efforts inside close to 1,000 PPC accounts. From all this data stretching back years, one starts to see some interesting patterns. It’s safe to say that going into the audit or live clinic process, I’ve generally expected to […]
Meta a Mano: Muse Spark Joins Elite Company
Thursday’s announcement of a new version of Meta’s AI model, to be offered at a cost to developers (competing with similar Claude and GPT offerings), was widely reported, and rightly so – it’s a high-growth area for this massive member of the Mag 7. Meta, by all accounts, “overinvested” in AI capacity. It looks like […]
The Infamous Google Ads “Tourist Tax”: Now More Expensive Than Ever
[This is an update of a piece — “The Google Ads Tourist Tax” — I wrote in 2010. We had reprinted it here, fortunately, as ClickZ has disappeared most of its old content.] Google runs a profitable amusement park, aimed specifically at new advertisers. Punch in some of your wittiest naming suggestions to have AI […]
Smart People Like You and Me vs. Persuasion Tactics from Mighty Google: How Google Uses Behavioral Economics – Right Inside the Ad Platform – to Lull Advertisers into Overspending
You don’t have to be a fancy behavioral economist to use fancy economics insights to arm yourself against the tricks of the trade. How powerful are cognitive biases in overcoming the best rational efforts of even super-smart folks? So powerful, in fact, that they’re irresistible in almost all cases – if done right. That’s according […]
Growth Isn’t One-Size-Fits-All: Celebrating Page Zero’s Client Exits
We’ve never been shy about celebrating the marquee Page Zero client exits, especially if there’s a splashy deal that makes headlines and moves markets. But most companies don’t land on the cover of Bloomberg when they hit a milestone. They’re smaller, often founder-led, and their “exit” is more personal than public. For those owners, a […]
You Can’t Impose Crappy. (Or Can You?)—Short and Long Term Fallout from the Rapid Adoption of AI Information Tools
If you’re like me, you’ve already taken AI tools like ChatGPT for numerous spins to test out their capabilities. Before long, it became apparent that those tools will find a ready market—people will begin to “search” in a whole new way. Although they aren’t quite ready for prime time, their power is incredible. This may […]
Can Microsoft’s AI Ambitions Finally Challenge Google’s Dominance in Search and Ads?
Microsoft just posted its prospective view on its emerging AI technologies and how users might engage with them in the ordinary course of Bing Search, and so on. There’s a hopeful view out there that, hey, Microsoft might really start tearing it up in these consumer spaces like Search. If users are delighted, their ad […]
The Recession and Advertising: Let’s Talk
We’ve all heard the tantalizing tales of some smarty-pants who snapped up recreational property in Florida and Arizona during the trough in prices following the financial crisis of 2008-2009, or the ultra-wealthy who loaded up on railroads and farmland during the Great Depression. So… am I about to tell you that you might be able […]