Remember Deep Blue? In 1997, IBM’s supercomputer beat world chess champ Garry Kasparov in competition. Brute force computing power was starting to reign supreme over human intelligence, at least in a competitive game with a large, but more or less finite, set of possible moves. Computing an optimal single move to do at least as well as an opponent is one thing, but “thinking ten...
5 Suggested PPC Campaign Experiments, from Plain-Jane All the Way to Fancy-Dancy
Last time I enthused about the power of the Google Ads Campaign Drafts and Experiments architectural framework. This week, I’ll suggest five experiments to try. I’d love to hear about your own unique experiments, too! In terms of setup, as alluded to previously, the process will often be about the same. You outline a key change or “big idea” you want to test...
Google Ads Campaign Experiments: A Controlled Environment to Test Almost Any PPC Campaign Strategy Theory
Note: this series is about ideas. It is not a step-by-step tutorial on how to navigate the ever-changing PPC advertising interfaces. Screen shots are employed selectively to elucidate the subject matter, but figuring out the precise order of implementation steps…that’s up to you. What more important topic is there to discuss under the heading of “The Science of PPC”...
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...
Prerequisites for Effective Smart Bidding in PPC
The days of "bid gaps" and bid jamming are long gone. Today's PPC auction is much more complex, with native features like Google's Smart Bidding designed to automate busywork and eliminate the bid jockeying of the early 2000s. But Smart Bidding is no panacea—take a closer look at Smart Bidding and where human learning ultimately prevails.
