Posts Tagged ‘ Paid Search Column ’

Choosing an attribution model: When, not which

Posted on: January 9, 2017 by in SEO
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Attribution is important, no matter your industry or your buying cycle. As more attribution models are created, it becomes more difficult to understand which one is the right one, and it seems that conversations about attribution models tend to occur with the expectation that each person has chosen a camp and believes in one particular model. The reality, though, is that no single attribution model can be the standalone source of truth — because no single attribution model can paint the full Continue Reading ...

How do our biases impact PPC performance?

Posted on: November 26, 2016 by in SEO
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I’ve come to believe that the essence of PPC management can be boiled down to two things: Never let one thing (keyword research, bid management, A/B testing ad copy and so on) take up so much of your attention that you let something else slip. What you did yesterday probably needs to be changed, and failing to adapt your methodology is as bad as having an empty “Change History” log. As you gain more experience in PPC, you start to develop patterns and favorite tactics out of necessity. Continue Reading ...

Perfect Your SEM Testing: How & Why To Evaluate Everything: SMX East 2016

Posted on: October 17, 2016 by in SEO
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A wiser man (or woman) than I coined the quintessential acronym of paid search. Rather than the ABCs of sales (Always Be Closing), savvy paid search managers live and die by ABT — Always Be Testing. In a session presented recently at SMX East, three of the brightest in the industry shared their tiers of testing strategies, successes and failures. “Perfect Your SEM Testing: How & Why To Evaluate Everything” featured insights from Ted Ives, owner of Ted Ives Consulting,; Jake Pinocchio, a Continue Reading ...

The ins and outs of keyword research

Posted on: October 14, 2016 by in SEO
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A great way to expand your PPC account is by performing keyword research in order to uncover untapped opportunities. Keyword research is a key tactic for growing an account — especially new accounts, but even mature accounts can stand to benefit from ongoing expansions. When keyword research does & does not make sense Keyword research is sometimes debated as being unnecessary, and it is fair to say that certain methods of keyword research are futile. Back in the day, it wasn’t uncommon to Continue Reading ...

Rethinking today’s attribution problem in digital marketing

Posted on: October 12, 2016 by in SEO
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Attribution is the science behind assigning values to individual touch points throughout a customer’s decision journey. It’s not only a key driver in how we currently optimize marketing campaigns, but attribution is also used for media mix modeling and developing media budgets. Herein lies the problem: marketers tend to look at attribution within our own channel silo, so it’s not easy to understand the full picture of a multi-channel environment. As search continues to evolve in form Continue Reading ...

The SEM automation primer

Posted on: August 29, 2016 by in SEO
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To varying degrees, my last few posts have flirted with the use of technology in search engine marketing. These posts have resulted in a few great questions regarding tools I’d use, or how to get started with this or that. There was recently a #ppcchat dedicated solely to the role of automation in this field, so I decided it would be a good time to provide a bit of a resource to those wishing to step toward such an approach. Below is a list of entry points, in ascending order of complexity, Continue Reading ...

How to get the old Google Keyword Planner volume data

Posted on: August 4, 2016 by in SEO
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Back in June, the AdWords Keyword Planner started displaying the same volume of searches for keywords that were similar. Search Engine Land reported on the anomalies and asked Google about it but didn’t receive a response at the time. Ginny Marvin speculated, and now an AdWords representative has confirmed, that this was caused by close variants. @tanestis Hi there, terms that are close variants of each other will show the same volumes within the Keyword Planner. -Mitch — Google AdWords Continue Reading ...

Expand all your AdWords ads in 30 seconds flat

Posted on: August 3, 2016 by in SEO
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Just about a week ago, all AdWords advertisers got access to expanded text ads. Have you converted your whole account over to take advantage of the new format yet? If you haven’t because you’ve been too busy with the day-to-day of managing accounts (or because you took that well-earned summer vacation), read on for an easy to use AdWords Script that can help. The concept The goal is to leverage all the work already done by your SEO team to give the PPC team a head start with creating longer Continue Reading ...

Machine learning for large-scale SEM accounts

Posted on: July 4, 2016 by in SEO
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A key challenge when working on what we could term “large-scale” PPC accounts is efficiency. There will always be more that you could do if given an unlimited amount of time to build out and optimize an AdWords campaign; therefore, the trick is managing priorities and being efficient with your time. In this post, I will talk about how concepts from machine learning could potentially be applied to help with the efficiency part. I’ll use keyword categorization as an example. To paraphrase Continue Reading ...

Influencing with ad copy: how to truly drive action

Posted on: June 23, 2016 by in SEO
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Persuasion. Influence. Psychology. The conversion rate optimization (CRO) crowd is adept at tapping into these to drive the actions of their audiences. When it comes to ad copy, there may not appear to be a lot we can do to actively influence our search audience. Short of a screaming headline (not allowed), all we have is a limited set of characters. We can make every one of those characters truly work by channeling our inner CRO expert. Before we jump into the words that work, let’s take a Continue Reading ...