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...
The New World of Competitive Metrics: Life After “Avg. Pos.”
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...
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)...
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...
Taxonomy is Sexy: The Power of Labels for PPC
A library cop they call Bookman Grabbed some beatnik ill-doers and shook them. Exclaimed Jerry S., “I’ll explain this whole mess!” (But first: this installment from Goodman.) Funny: many of the best ideas to improve workflow, communications, and optimization within digital advertiser platforms started out as foundational ideas for information architecture on websites long before they became...
