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...
The New World of Competitive Metrics: Life After “Avg. Pos.”
Nudged: The Science of (Ignoring) Google Ads’ Optimization Score
A bit of context for this week’s installment: it may be helpful to reinforce what we’re all about here at Page Zero. Ever read content by a digital-first company such as Basecamp, GoToMeeting, Zoom, or Dropbox, extolling the virtues of remote work? No one should be surprised that they write about that, since their products are premised on that very thing. They’re simply selling (and, yes, eating)...
Is DSA Your Friend? Pros & Cons of Dynamic Search Ads in PPC
In Part 16, I pointed out that PPC accounts eventually have to expand beyond the low-hanging fruit if they’re going to contribute to further business growth. Part of that effort is to expand to higher-funnel research stage queries, to marginal queries that could be bid lower, and to long tail queries that no human being could rightly expect to discover via research or prediction. There are a...
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...
Life Beyond GDN: Why Mature Advertisers Should Flee Google’s “Training Wheel” Display Ad Network
One of my favorite childhood books was The Large and Growly Bear. It’s a cute way of learning how a bully boxes himself in and how the rest of us are better off going about our business rather than trying to appease said bully. This bear goes around trying to scare the birds, moles, and rabbits, but they’re too busy catching worms, singing, digging, and jumping to bother being scared. In the end...
