How could something that sounds so good, be so wrong-headed?
A layered approach to assessing paid search effectiveness. Now is the time to raise the bar.
The long tail matters.
Landing pages matter in paid search. Don’t let robots pick yours.
The value of traffic from each network partner varies. Allowing advertisers to control what they pay for traffic from each would benefit the advertisers, the quality publishers, and the engines.
Quality Score and Bid play equal roles in determining an ads visibility, but that doesn’t mean you should spend the same amount of time working on each.
Anticipating traffic value shifts at the holidays is the key to a successful Q4.
In paid search, metrics often vary in unexpected ways. Unexplained variation is often referred to as “noise.” Noise occurs on top of, and can sometimes cloud our view of, the true underlying pattern, or, the “signal.”
Part 2 of our study: much of the conventional wisdom around paid search driving store sales may be wrong.
Google finds what we found to be true years ago.
The term “portfolio” has more than one meaning.
When your SEM says “those keywords didn’t work”, it’s time to find a new agency.
“Two Concepts of Rules,” with apologies to John Rawls.
How your PPC efforts are tracked can have a significant impact on the program’s performance. Javascript-based tracking systems used by most web analytics systems typically lose 10 – 30% of the sales driven by paid search. Find out why and how to plug this hole.
Is the customer always right? It depends on the service.
More scratchings on the so called PPC buying cycle.
My monthly column for Search Engine Land in case you missed it.
This was published at Search Engine Land on Monday February 16th, in case you missed it.
Google’s Broad Match changed over the summer — unbeknownst to them!
What would your paid search program look like if it was missing 50% of the sales that it was generating? Would you alter your bidding?
Can you bid more than your target efficiency and make it up in volume? Often, no.
Proper attribution is critically important, and we recommend revisiting your cookie windows periodically to make sure you’re in the right neighborhood. Too long and you’re liable to waste money by over advertising, too short and you may miss opportunities.
The Buying Cycle is used by some as an excuse for overspending on general keywords. It’s a lovely theory, but we thought it was high time to take another look at whether the data supports it.
Happy with your position crawling bid system? Find out why it is undoubtedly leaving money on the table.
When does it make sense to view a marketing program holistically, and when does it make sense to look at it in increments? In other words, if a program is working as a whole, does it matter if some pieces of it are inefficient? Does it depend on how inefficient?