About The Science of PPC

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In today’s ultra-competitive world of PPC, “good” account management just isn’t enough. To survive in a world where everyone is already good, you have to discover where the “great” lies.

But what exactly makes one paid search strategy stand out from the others?

At my agency, Page Zero Media, the difference between good and great PPC results comes down to comprehensive analysis supported by real-world PPC experience and collaboration with great colleagues.

No comprehensive analysis is complete without a thorough understanding of the products or services being marketed and the history of the account being managed. Sure, you may have a “feel” for the product, the account, or both. But if you want to turn good performance into great performance, you need to back up your intuition with real-world data, a clear understanding of the relationship between moving parts, and your account’s optimization history.

That’s where “The Science of PPC” comes in.

My goal with this 50-part series is to expose readers to enough insights, tips, tricks, and examinations of real-world methodologies for you to walk away with some feeling of mastery and confidence in your own powers of PPC analysis.
My goal with this 50-part series is to expose readers to enough insights, tips, tricks, and examinations of real-world methodologies for you to walk away with some feeling of mastery and confidence in your own powers of PPC analysis. (Or maybe you’ll hire our agency — that works too!)

Throughout the series, we’ll address topics like:

  • Using data to analyze ad creative
  • Prerequisites for effective Smart Bidding
  • Framing and anchoring techniques (“nudges”) lurking in the Google Ads interface nearly guaranteed to bamboozle you!
  • What to do about remarketing?
  • How to address the “long tail” of unusual / unpredictable search queries
  • Which ad position converts best?
  • How to run a “true” campaign experiment (and why)

There’s a lot of noise in the world of PPC, with self-identified experts triumphantly touting the “best” way to do something, the hottest new metric, or lamenting the loss of old features and the introduction of shiny new ones that are supposed to make great PPC easy. In a lot of these cases, surface-level analysis is presented as encyclopedic expertise.

Google Ads is a testing lab just like any other (okay, not just like any other—you won’t find any bubbling beakers or Bunsen burners here). But like other labs, we don’t have powers of full observation.

Of course, some facts can be checked. When there is an overwhelming consensus about certain tendencies, myths tend to be easier to combat. But through this swirling eddy of myths emerges one persistent truth: to improve over time, PPC marketers must be open to experimentation and trying new things.

Let’s put “good” aside. Let’s go for great.

Away to the testing lab we go.

Andrew Goodman
Founder and President, Page Zero Media

On to Part 1

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About the Author

Andrew Goodman is Founder & President of Page Zero Media. His accomplishments include writing the first-ever full-length book about Google AdWords, heading up this Google Ads Premier Partner agency, maintaining a string of 48 consecutive speaking engagements at Search Engine Strategies in North America, co-founding a startup called HomeStars, and wearing the dickens out of a lab coat at the SMX Advanced session called Mad Scientists. His active lifestyle requires increasingly elaborate bowls of yogurt. He works from the Toronto office as well as a home office in Fredericton, NB.

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