Digital Marketing, PPC, eCommerce and Lead Gen
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[…]
When Google introduced Responsive Ads to all advertisers in July 2018, I saw it as an opportunity to simplify the workflow for a common optimization task performed by search marketers: ad copy testing. It has long been a best practice to run multiple variations of ad copy simultaneously, accrue data, and decide winners and losers[…]
After somebody clicks on an ad, the only way to turn that person from a window shopper to a customer is the experience you provide for them on your website. It’s that critical moment, right after a click, for your brand to make an impression, gain trust, and ultimately get the person to spend their[…]
I wanted to start this blog series off (check out part 1) talking about one of the most underutilized and misunderstood digital marketing mediums: email. Email marketing is much more than just sending a newsletter or sales to your consumers. There are many secondary benefits from running an email marketing program, most of which can help[…]
When I first got into PPC management, I had basically no client management skills. I got into PPC because I read a book called The Future of Music (I’m a musician) that explained to me how digital distribution was changing entire industries and how the Internet made it possible for anyone to sell anything to[…]
The Technique In a previous post, I showed you how telling your customers how many have converted unlocks the principle of social proof and is helpful in persuading more people to take action. In that test, I simply replaced a fairly generic introductory text in an ad designed to attract subscribers on Facebook to include[…]
PPC Management Takeaways From Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2018 With another Black Friday and Cyber Monday PPC season under our belts, it’s time for us to exhale with the rest of the retail and marketing world. As we take a second to catch our breath, we wanted to look back at the crazy week[…]
The Ecosystem Approach If you have ever chatted with me about digital marketing, you have most likely heard me say (over and over again) that digital marketing is an ecosystem. Over the next few months, I’ll be writing about the ecosystem approach to digital marketing. I’ll tackle all the components of the marketing ecosystem, what[…]
The Technique It’s been well-documented in marketing psychology books like Brainfluence and others that offering too many choices to your customers can create frustration and a mental paralysis that leads to lower rates of people taking action. This New York Times article dives more deeply into the psychology behind it. But basically, when the number[…]
Joe Martinez, our Director of Paid Media & Community at Granular, just wrapped up presenting at Confluence Conference for the third year in a row. Everyone in attendance got to learn why they cannot avoid YouTube advertising anymore. Besides learning about the value of YouTube, marketers got to learn all of the targeting options to make[…]
The Technique There’s a single word that can lead you to getting better results from your PPC ads. That word is because. Why is this word so effective? Because whatever you put after that word acts as a justification or reason why a person should comply with your request. And because people have grown used[…]
