General Marketing Insights

For too long, I disregarded Google Sheets as a poor man’s Excel. I’d grown up with excel – from making tables in 5th grade to learning advanced linear programming in my Supply Chain degree courses. Google Sheets didn’t have the processing power, the features, the familiarity. And in some respects, it still doesn’t. There’s no[…]

Here at Granular, we’ve read countless articles and have had many heated discussions about who has the best French fries in Milwaukee. Being data-driven individuals, we always took issue with the methodologies we read about from other sources. So naturally, we had to take matters into our own hands and bring you the definitive list[…]

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[…]

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[…]

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,[…]

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[…]

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.”[…]

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[…]

It hurts when you realize that the thing you believe is good, is actually not good at all. Like when I play pick-up basketball in my 30’s with a memory of what my body could do in my early 20’s. Sometimes the truth hurts, but it’s what makes us better. ANYWAYS – let’s talk Facebook[…]

Gallery Night and Day in Milwaukee is back, and Granular is happy to be a part of the fun for the first time. If you’re not familiar with the event, participants can enjoy “an evening of gallery hopping and art viewing beginning Friday, January 20 and continuing during the day on Saturday, January 21.” Not only do[…]

5 Ways to Avoid a Bad PPC Holiday (eCom and Retail) Set Annual Budgets and Plan for Higher CPCs Unless you’re selling water filters or diapers, there’s typically some seasonality baked into your eCommerce business. Make sure you plan out your annual SEM budget to coincide with increases in demand, sales and competition. Many people[…]

ICYMI – I did a 45 minute podcast on Google Shopping where I went in depth on the technical and strategic side of Google Shopping. It’s worth a listen if you would like to learn more about Shopping for your own skill-set or simply want to use this to ask questions to your current agency[…]

“Yeah, we can do that too”. Famous last words of the once-focused agency. Too many agencies and marketing contractors go the way of the cable companies, bundling their clients into massive contracts offering multiple services for one large fee. Marketing your company should be no different that your personal life. Do you LOVE your bundled[…]

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.[…]