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...
Three Clever Ways to Use Google Ad Customizers
By virtue of campaign structure – ideally a structure that is well-categorized, thematic, or “granular” – PPC ads are supposed to be highly relevant to the keyword search performed by a user. In a way, we consider these ads to be inherently personalized, even if we don’t know a great deal about the user. But that’s only a baby step along the way towards the promise of richer personalization...
Three Deceptively Powerful Shopify Reports PPC Marketers Should Know
As any seasoned marketer knows, there are a lot more factors that add up to online business growth than just what’s going on in PPC platforms. Heck, at Page Zero we’ve sunk our teeth into dozens of contributing factors when it comes to client business growth: choosing a domain name; customizing Google Analytics; executing on an email marketing program; selecting a provider of conversion testing...
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...