Google’s recent decision to cease reporting on low-impression search queries – a minor nuisance, at first glance – appears to unleash more complexity than one might think. It has certainly produced strong opinions. The long and the short of it is: if, as an advertiser, you were accustomed to a reporting standard that would show you something like 10,000 unique queries (mapped to the keywords...
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...
If One Part of Your Ad Group is Broken, Your Tests Could Be Misguided
The cool but challenging thing about targeted advertising is dealing with all the moving parts. Sometimes, for example, we may do our best to interpret an ad test, but in an environment where our analysis is handicapped by other mistakes that skew the test. Let’s say our targeting is inadvertently too broad. An account manager has bid relatively high on a one-word broad match, using any of the...
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...
Selecting a Bid Strategy: Top Two PPC Bid Strategies to Avoid
Selecting a bid strategy is pretty much the make-or-break Google Ads campaign setting. For novice advertisers, this decision passes by in a whisper of time. Many have no idea as to the nuances of the reign of terror they’ve just unleashed – an environment conducive to massive waste, masquerading as an ad campaign. When pay-per-click search advertising was invented, there was no such thing...
