There’s something magical, mystical, and entirely unrealistic about forecasting on limited data. In Michael Lewis’ classic Moneyball, Billy Beane is the data-centric hero – a new breed of baseball manager for data-intensive times. But Billy knows when data has its limits: he regards pitchers to be like writers, as opposed to thoroughbred racehorses. Strong, hard-throwing, etc.? Nice on the...
Does Smart Bidding Make Life Simpler? That’s a Definite Maybe
Online advertising scales, if you let it. Once something scales, complexity threatens to drown us. That’s why we must use Occam’s Razor at times. Recognizing this, Google has packaged Smart Bidding using shorthand terminology and easy implementation in a bid (pun unintentional) to reduce the number of decisions facing human account managers. That could help you. On the other hand, if you’re a...
Beautiful Snowflakes: The Unique Behaviors of Your Best Customers
Earlier today, Maya the cat (pictured below, foreground) was watching snowflakes out the window. She’s just a cat, so for her, it’s a mild diversion before her next nap. She’s never heard all that oohing and aahing about how every snowflake is unique. Being a marketer, and not a cat, the snowflakes made me think about a report in Google Analytics. Figure 1: Not planning to log...
Don’t Let the Anchor Sink You! How Google Ads Exploits Cognition to Inflate CPCs
In the behavioral economics literature (for an approachable overview, see Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow; also, Michael Lewis’ vivid biographical account of Daniel Kahneman’s and Amos Tversky’s lifelong intellectual relationship in The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds), Nobel-winning economists fuse psychology and economics to suss out sources of...
Ad “Creative” for PPC: Let the Data Speak
Every few years, the technology powering paid search creative undergoes a major shift. Advances in computing power have us on the cusp of the next major shift—user-specific customization—but before we cross that threshold, it's important to understand and execute on the basic principles that got us where we are today.
