Recently, I had dinner in Orlando with Bill and Ted (not their real names), some pretty successful digital agency owners. (By successful, I mean more than 50 employees and strong annual revenues.) They’ve been friends of mine for a long time, so I assumed they’d be up for a little of the usual expert banter. The first punch in the gut came when I casually explained about some PPC bidding methods we routinely use. My friends had...
SEM Blog
Paid Search Marketing / 29.01.2016
PPC Geo-Bidding, Simplified
Recently, I came across a social media post that — honest to goodness — went on at length about the price the poster would be willing to pay for a new brand of ketchup. “I’d need 50 percent off to give it a try,” opined the timid tomato tester. “If I turn out not to like the product, it’s just a whole lot of wasted time, and a waste of food .” “This calls for snark!” some alien voice...
At our company’s informal book club, we recently had a nice discussion of David Hand’s The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day. Belief in causation where there is only correlation, faulty assumptions about how “randomness” works and similar errors are shockingly common, even among the educated. Superstition can be a nightmare for the marketing practitioner, who can be praised or blamed for factors that fall outside of her control. Better measurement helps, of course — but...
Page Zero News / 24.11.2015
Independent Research Firm Clutch names Page Zero Media a PPC Industry Leader
Toronto-based Page Zero Media has been recognized as an industry leader in a recent consolidated US and Canadian market research study. The study, conducted by Clutch, an independent research firm, ranked Page Zero Media third out of more than 30 US and Canadian PPC agencies, and featured Page Zero on their 2015 PPC Agencies Leaders Matrix. Page Zero was in tight competition with two other American PPC-only agencies. It was the company’s exceptionally high scores for...
Paid Search Marketing / 05.11.2015
Targeting on Google’s Display Network (GDN): The Lowdown on Layering
Historically, the Google Display Network (GDN) had limited features, and it was impossible to fine-tune and narrowly target segments/users/customers. Today, there are more ways advertisers can target people/users interested in buying products or services. Furthermore, we’re better able to layer products so they work in tandem. In this article, I’ll discuss some of the targeting options available and discuss some of the ways I like to layer them into campaigns. The inspiration for this article came from a...
SEO / 05.10.2015
Reactive SEO vs. Proactive SEO
I, for one, love and respect our spam-fighting, quality-content-loving overlords. Perhaps because I'm mainly associated with the PPC side of our company, I and my paid-media contemporaries can get a little cantankerous about the details of paid search products, as addicted to them as we and our clients may be. That can tend to overshadow the awe and wonder we should feel about search technology as a whole. Through relentless effort via algorithm updates (primarily Panda), Google has...
[This post is a companion to a panel session at SMX East in New York, Sep. 30, 2015: The Great PPC Account Structure Debate - #smx #23B] It's no secret that I'm no fan of needless busywork in PPC account management. Just as SEO firms used to bill clients for what Jill Whalen famously reduced to "boondoggles" -- filling potholes that don't exist, if you will -- I've generally been wary of long to-do lists in...