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...
Extreme Relevance Won’t Pay the Bills: How to Broaden your PPC Campaigns
“… The end goal, as always, is to find a string that, when tugged, rings a clarion bell that draws physicists toward something new. As Einstein reportedly said, if you know how it’s going to turn out, it’s not science, it’s engineering.” – Daniel J. Levitin, A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age Extreme relevance could be...
The Holy Grail of Extreme PPC Ad Relevance
We fans of “new media,” as it was once called, have, of course, been brave visionaries. Among other things, we have felt – nay, proven – that online advertising is typically far less wasteful than traditional broadcast and print advertising. The more measurable a process is, the less wasteful it’s likely to be. Waste is good business – for some. Just ask Tony Soprano. As the...
Fail to Succeed: Steer Clear of Overconfidence to Win at PPC
In what some readers interpreted as a piece of gentle advice to startup founders, Seth Godin recently took issue with the cocky approach to strategy embodied in the remark: “I don’t see how it could fail.” If you haven’t studied various ways that your product could fail to connect with its target market, then you might not have deep enough insight into how difficult the journey is going to be. If...
