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...
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...
Goldilocks & the Three Scones: A PPC Bidding Hack That Could Save You Money on So-So Queries
The PPC world is currently agog with the news that Google is going to stop showing advertisers a large percentage of lower-volume queries in our Search Terms report. (Indeed, they already have.) It seems imperative to address potential responses to this change, so I’ll do so next week. In the meantime, no matter how full or complete our query data remains, negative keywords will continue to be a...
Five Ways to Keep Smart Bidding From Acting Not-So-Smart
In this week’s instalment I have one sharp new tip, and a few reminders of other key ways to use Smart Bidding without getting into hot water. As PPC account managers, many of us want some control. Yet under typical conditions, Smart Bidding in Google Ads gives us zero levers to pull. Boo. Well, look over here as I peel back the vinyl covering (it looks like a BBQ cover, but it has the Page Zero...
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...
