Once upon a time, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld noted: “…as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free...
Four Misconceptions About Audiences for SEM
Audiences, layered over other means of targeting in PPC platforms like Google Ads, can provide us with further means of refinement in our marketing campaigns. If one delves into all of the available types of audiences, the prospects can seem tantalizing. For years, the main types of audiences used tended to be for remarketing. In many cases, that hasn’t changed. Not only can you come up with...
Ten Telltale Characteristics of Failed PPC Accounts
Much of the thrust of The Science of PPC – like much of the published literature in our industry – is to provide advice. Tips and tricks, even. “What to do” is generally the stock in trade of marketing-related content. I guess you could consider this week the “What Not to Wear” of digital marketing. To all of you slovenly, shabby, outmoded, career-limiting accounts: your friends and family have...
The New World of Competitive Metrics: Life After “Avg. Pos.”
Many PPC’ers were distraught when, in 2019, Google sunsetted the average ad position metric in Google Ads. That metric was one of our go-to decision criteria for bid aggressiveness. Even if your approach to bidding should align with financial KPI’s like CPA (Cost/Conv.) or ROAS (Conv. Value/Cost), you don’t want to “bid through the top of the auction,” so monitoring position would be useful to...
Click Fraud: Is Third-Party Detection Software the Answer?
Through LinkedIn, yet another B2B vendor tried to trick me into a “friendly” conversation when all he really wanted was to sell me on the merits of his company’s product: in this case, anti-click-fraud-detection software. It felt a little like an interaction with Snoopy flying a WW2 bomber. Dogs and generals, and sales reps too young to know how obsolete a product has become, are apparently...
