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...
Three Deceptively Powerful Shopify Reports PPC Marketers Should Know
As any seasoned marketer knows, there are a lot more factors that add up to online business growth than just what’s going on in PPC platforms. Heck, at Page Zero we’ve sunk our teeth into dozens of contributing factors when it comes to client business growth: choosing a domain name; customizing Google Analytics; executing on an email marketing program; selecting a provider of conversion testing...
Predicting Your Customer’s Story, Or Helping to Write It? On Lifetime Value and the Overreach of Predictive Analytics
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...
