Digital Marketing, PPC, eCommerce and Lead Gen
“What is our competition doing right now?” “We don’t want to come off as tone-deaf or insensitive with our ads.” “We don’t want sales to tank, but orders are down due to COVID-19. I don’t think pausing all ads is the right thing to do, but we can’t keep spending what we were. What do[…]
With the advent of machine learning & automated bidding, you may be wondering what tools merchants can use to push their products for relevant queries. Say for example, if every merchant is using automated bidding for a particular search query, how does Google choose who shows up and who gets their products shown first? It[…]
If you work in digital marketing and create campaigns for Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc, you know that you can never check your work enough before launching campaigns. The worst feeling ever is thinking you may have forgotten to set your budgets or that you accidentally targeted the entire United States when you only meant to[…]
If you manage Google Shopping ads and Google Merchant Center product feeds, especially for ecommerce websites that have price changes and dollar- or percent-off sales, then there is a good chance that you have ran into an issue where your Google Shopping Ads display the incorrect price. This can be frustrating if you are counting[…]
Granular’s Remote Work Tools / Tech Stack At Granular we’ve been setup to work remotely since day one. While most of the team is in Milwaukee, we were built to have a flexible work schedule and be able to be plugged into work from remote places. PPC doesn’t sleep, weekends and holidays need coverage sometimes[…]
Are you a work from home pro, or beginner? While more and more people are working from home, it’s important to remember that working from home can be very different from working in the office. Our office started to work from home this week, and while some of my coworkers are pros, some of us[…]
Ad Customizers Part 2 In part one of this three-part blog post, I shared how Ad Customizers are superior to DKI. We are still waiting on statistically significant data to prove our point. In the meantime, below is some helpful information on how to implement. How to Implement To implement these in your own campaigns,[…]
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,[…]
Do Google Gmail Ads Work for Restaurants? Most restaurants I’ve worked with seem to have tried Google Search Ads at some point, and although Search can be successful, common questions I hear are “what else can we do on Google?” and “how do we get new customers?” Surprisingly, I have found that most brands have[…]
The success of PPC campaigns is more than just what you see in the interface There are always challenges when running any successful paid search campaign. Most of the time, people will look at the data right in front of them when attempting to address a challenge they are facing. Sometimes, the answers can only[…]
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[…]
In paid advertising, we all know the pains of quality score. We work incredibly hard with our clients to get their website to reflect exactly what their business does. Then we write ad copy based on those landing pages and our keywords need to be the most relevant to the user. But sometimes no matter[…]
Google Ad Customizers: Part 1 At a former agency, I worked on a PPC account that was so geographically segmented that we targeted such hot spots as Twin Falls, Idaho (population <50,000), and separated out Orem, UT from Provo, UT (a distance of less than 5 miles). This account was terribly under-managed, because most of[…]
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.”[…]
Updated: June 30, 2023 It will be missed… If your business was in the right category (gas station, restaurant, coffee shop, bank, auto dealer, grocery store, or any niche business with an offline location) Waze was filled with amazing advertising opportunities, heck just look at some of earlier coverage of their features and updates. But[…]
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[…]
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[…]
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[…]
I’m writing this the day after Halloween, which may be the perfect time to talk about Google Ads scripts since it’s a fairly scary subject to most people dealing with accounts. But let me tell you…it doesn’t have to be. With such an amazing, sharing community all around us, PPCers aren’t on their own…ever. Trust[…]
Some would say we’re not significantly affected by the media we consume. I don’t claim to be one of them. After watching a lot of the movies being put out these days that show futuristic visions of how artificial intelligence might be incorporated into the world in the future, I can’t help but wonder how[…]
Synergy, change agents, deep dive, circle back, boiling the ocean, ping me – remember some of these cringe-worthy business buzzwords? Business is full of them, and yes I admit, I still use some of these words from time to time. What is it about business that gets us stuck on meaningless one-liners and platitudes devoid[…]
For a little while now, Facebook has been pushing its Marketplace section as a sort of Craigslist killer. There are quite a lot of listing and a decent amount of traffic inside Facebook’s Marketplace system. But it hasn’t caught on the way Facebook hoped. While the Facebook Marketplace is not going anywhere, as of now.[…]
With the advent of quick-to-market ecommerce platforms like Shopify, Big Commerce, and Squarespace (just to name a few) there are more people jumping into the world of ecommerce every day. While it’s possible to grow an organic footprint for an ecommerce brand, PPC and paid media continue to be the driving force behind ecommerce sales.[…]
Check out previous blogs in this series Think of digital content as gas in your car’s gas tank. The more content you create, the farther you can go on a single tank. In this metaphor, PPC campaigns are your car – your means of conveyance. A car without any gas renders it useless. On the[…]
Leads, leads, leads! It’s the cry of B2B marketers everywhere, and for good reason. But consider this…do you try to force your offline relationships into spaces they’re not ready for? Or do you instead nurture relationships with prospects and customers in ways that work for them as you build trust and gently nudge them toward[…]
