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.
What Counts as (PPC) Science?
What counts as science? It’s certainly not for me to say. I’m neither a historian of science, nor a metaphysician, nor any type of arbiter of what counts as “scientific”. I did pretty well in high school, but. I abandoned the computer club (despite getting good, easy grades in Computer Science) because I didn’t have the requisite level of interest level in programming. At...
Search Engine Advertising: A Brief History
Keyword advertising is now in its 20’s. Some brief history. A lab is born The first company of significance to ever offer keyword-targeted ads appearing near Web search results was a search engine called Open Text, in 1996. In 1999, a leading search engine – AltaVista – did the same amid predictions that their greed would drive them out of business. (It wasn’t advertising, but rather...
