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...
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...
