Mike Fleming

Use Google Trusted Store as an AdWords Review

Are you an eCommerce business owner or have a PPC client that is a Google Trusted Store? You can now add the benefit of being a trusted store to your Review Extensions in AdWords! More ad real estate is ALWAYS a good thing; Google knows it, good PPC managers know it, now you know it.[…]

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"How LinkedIn Ads is supporting the virtual events trend"

How LinkedIn Ads Is Supporting The Virtual Events Trend

In LinkedIn’s Best Practice Guide for Events, they mention… In the midst of that, LinkedIn has come alongside to support this trend with new products and features on their platform that support the promotion and hosting of online events. This of course makes a ton of sense for their platform because event marketing is great[…]

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linkedin event ads

How LinkedIn Ads Is Supporting The Virtual Events Trend

Chances are by now you’ve either organized or attended an online event you might not have prior to the pandemic. In LinkedIn’s Best Practice Guide for Events, they mention… 65% of B2B marketers are planning to reallocate some or most of their live event budgets to online events due to Covid-19. The types of online[…]

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responsive search ads

My Satisfying Approach For Making Quality Responsive Search Ads (RSAs)

I have some issues with the approach of creating Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) as soon as you start a new campaign in a Google Ads account. First, RSAs use the headlines and description lines you input. How do you know if those inputs are any good? Until you have data that proves it to be[…]

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Google Ads Grants: Important Requirements & Helpful Strategy Tips

I forget what the psychological effect is called, but something happens to people when they get free money.  They tend to be more careless with it.  “Oh, I just got a bonus in my paycheck?  Yippe ki yay!  I’ll go blow it on a doodad I’ve been wanting for a while,” we think.  “Oh, I[…]

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5 YouTube Ad Placement Types You Need To Watch Out For

It’s true. There are some really bad placements for your ads on YouTube. For the unsuspecting advertiser that follows a basic campaign set up and uses some broader targeting options (like topics and keywords), they may just find that they’ve been serving ads before and during videos that either don’t deliver any value, or worse,[…]

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The Unbelievably Easy Way To Compare Your Products’ Prices In Google Shopping

I have a huge flea market not too far from my house.  When I go there and find something I want to buy, I make sure I cover the whole market first because I regularly find multiple vendors that are selling the same thing.  And while the first vendor that carries the product may be[…]

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Google Ads Keyword Match Types Have Changed. Here’s What You Should Do.

Ever since Google used the phrase “don’t be evil” as its motto and in its corporate code of conduct, people have been using the phrase to judge every action they take as evil or not.  With the latest change to their advertising platform, people are asking themselves again – is Google being evil?  Some think[…]

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4 Ways To Find The Right YouTube Videos To Target With Your Ads

YouTube can be kind of a dangerous place to advertise if you don’t know what you’re doing.  Why is that?  Well…consider this… As of this writing, there are about 720,000 hours of new video content uploaded to YouTube every day(!!!), and that content varies widely.  What’s more, the audiences watching that content varies wildly.  Personally,[…]

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13 Paid Search Ad Techniques To Try For Relatively Unknown Products

A new client recently started with us and brought with them a sort of unique situation when it comes to Paid Search.  I had heard about examples of this situation before but had never directly worked with it. The unique part of working with this client is people don’t search for what they offer. Huh,[…]

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How To Grab & Hold Attention With YouTube Video Advertising

Some people are calling the last few years “The Goldfish Era.”  Why?  Because studies are showing the human attention span has become about as long as those of a goldfish.  Actually, the data is showing that they’re shorter! According to Microsoft research, which has been quoted numerous times, human attention span dropped from 12 seconds[…]

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Persuasively prepare ppc audience

How To Persuasively Prepare PPC Audiences For Offers Prior To Asking

There’s a saying in marketing and sales that goes something like this… Some people will buy from you no matter what you do.  Some people won’t buy from you no matter what you do.  It’s what you do with the rest that determines how successful you’ll be. Since this is the case, it’s our job[…]

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Try My Dynamic Search Ads Strategy & Build Long-Term Search Success

Here I’m going to suggest an approach to using Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) campaigns in mid-to-large ecommerce Google and Microsoft Ads accounts that is likely not what you’d hear from the typical account manager. From what I’ve heard and read, most account managers use DSA campaigns to fill in the missing holes in their accounts[…]

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Google Shopping Annotations: 7 Options That Make Product Ads Stand Out

A constantly moving task and target in Search marketing is making your ads stand out from the crowd. In crowded search results pages where multiple companies (including you) are selling similar products and services, how do you best communicate what you have to offer and put your best foot forward to earn a click and[…]

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Improve Virtual Event Attendance With LinkedIn’s Sponsored Message Ads

Social media news feeds are crowded and noisy and people scroll through them quickly. While they can and do work for advertising, it’s not exactly a captive audience. But LinkedIn has an ad type that allows you to avoid that. Reach people’s message inbox directly LinkedIn Sponsored Message Ads (formerly InMail) are ads that are[…]

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How I Cut CPCs By -40% In 2 Weeks With Expanded Text Ads

In his book Digital Marketing in and AI World, Frederick Vallaeys makes the point that there are some things machines can do better than humans and there are some things humans can do better than machines. It’s in using the combination of these strengths that we find the best results.     One area where[…]

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5 New Features That Has LinkedIn Advertising Stepping Up Its Game

If you haven’t noticed yet, the LinkedIn advertising platform has been stepping up its game. Out of all the major digital ad platforms that we deal with (Google, Bing, Facebook, etc.), LinkedIn’s platform and capabilities has historically been the worst in my (and many others) opinion. This is of course outside of the vastly superior[…]

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How To Organize Your Tasks For Maximum Productivity

In the field of analytics, the great Avinash Kaushik has said “data in aggregate is crap.” Why did he say this? Because when you aggregate numbers, things become blurry. To say your website got a million visits last month might mean something to you, but breaking it down into how that is spread out among[…]

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Be More Productive: How To Deal With Everything On Your Plate

One of the biggest hindrances to productivity is how we feel at any given time. We’ve all said it – “I don’t feel like doing anything today” or “I don’t feel like going to work.” And it’s true, we all need time blocked off to do nothing or do only what we enjoy. But sometimes[…]

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How To Plan To Be Productive: 5 Steps To Doing What Matters Each Day

Sometimes you get to the end of the day and say “I didn’t get anything done that I wanted to get done today!”  Sometimes that’s unavoidable.  Life happens.  But I’d argue that most of the time, it IS avoidable. To be as productive as you can be, you can’t just work your way down a[…]

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The First Step To Being More Productive: Getting Things Off Your Mind

In the book Getting Things Done, David Allen shares this about the human mind… The short-term memory part of your mind – the part that tends to hold all of the incomplete, undecided, and unorganized stuff – functions much like RAM on a computer.  Your conscious mind, like the computer screen is a focusing tool,[…]

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3 Questions That Will Make You More Productive Right Away

Every once in a while, my wife will start a conversation with me with a sigh and the exclamation that she “feels overwhelmed.”  What she means by this is she’s decided that she has “a million things to do” (her words) and she doesn’t see a way to get it all done with the time[…]

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Why A Growing Number of People Should Consider Productivity Training

If you’ve got indoor plumbing, a machine in your basement that pumps hot and cool air into your house, and it’s just a trip down the road to pick up all the food you can eat, then life is good.  Most, if not all, of your daily problems are, as the saying goes, “first-world problems.”[…]

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Is Digital Advertising A Bubble That’s Going To Pop?

I know a way to make your PPC ads out-of-this-world effective. Just make sure you show them to people that are going to buy anyway! 🙂 In this recent blog post, it was suggested that online advertising is a bubble, and that sooner or later people are going to figure out that all the money[…]

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A Way To Build Google Ads Campaigns For The Holidays Fast

Sometimes the holidays creep up on us (and our clients!) quickly.  While our typical approach to an account is to take our time and incrementally build out campaigns as we meet performance goals and focus on quality over quantity, the holiday season brings upon us a whole different set of circumstances.  Businesses are in the[…]

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The Google Ads Automated Rules Setting That Can Screw Up Everything

Automated rules are good for situations where you know you’re going to need to make changes at some point in the future based on some criteria like performance or time. For example, you might increase or decrease a bid on a keyword if it meets certain performance thresholds. Or you might want to pause campaigns[…]

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