Paid Search & PPC

On October 17, 2016, AdWords introduced click-to-message ad extensions to the public. This new ad extension allows users who see an ad on Google.com to click on a SMS icon to immediately contact the business using it. Here’s what it looks like… Not only do ad extensions help boost your ad rank, but this new[…]

I’ve been lucky enough to be able to go to at least one marketing conference a year for the past couple of years. I’ve heard from my PPC friends online a couple of times their boss doesn’t see the value of sending them to a conference. One common reason is the cost. Another reason is[…]

Don’t worry. I’m not going to waste your time with a bunch of stats on why mobile is important. You’re a smart PPC marketer and already know it’s important. But if you’re not seeing the engagement results you’d like from your mobile ads, here are three tips you can test to increase your performance! Make Sure[…]

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[…]

Before I got into digital marketing, terms such as “quality score, CPC, CTR or match types” would have been foreign to me. The mentioned PPC terms are some of the simplest terms for any PPC marketer to understand. For someone not in the field, these terms make no sense at all. The lack of understanding paid search[…]

Hey! I’m Mike Henderson, Digital Marketing Director at SuretyBonds.com where I manage our paid search and other online marketing initiatives. I started at SuretyBonds.com in October 2013. Prior to coming on, I was fresh out of college working at a small ad agency. I was hesitant to make the move to in-house, but like most[…]

Joe Martinez, our Senior Manager of Paid Media & Community at Granular, just got back from presenting at Confluence Conference last week in Oklahoma City. The full house at Will Rogers Theatre learned how advertisers should focus their ad content on the user experience. Building user trust, backed up by a great customer experience, leads to livelong users.[…]

The Growth Hackathon is a one day workshop for high-potential, entrepreneurial-minded individuals to turn their startup idea into a business with measurable traction by the end of the day. There are great startup ideas, but many fail to get the awareness and volume of customer feedback required to move from the idea stage to a[…]

Broad Match. The match type that strikes fear in the hearts of any experienced, PPC marketer. We’ve all seen accounts hurting themselves by using nothing but broad match keywords. While I admit to jumping on the broad match hate-train every once in a while, I also acknowledge that it isn’t bad in all cases. There[…]

In-house life… What’s the deal Duane? I used to work freelance and agency life for a number of years. The reasons I love working in-house boil down to 6 key areas from startups to growing businesses. Time Ideas Training Business Veto Tracking But let me expand on each one and tell you why I love[…]

Unless you’re focused on brand awareness, conversions are the lifeblood to any campaign success. To understand the true ROI your campaigns are achieving, it helps to associate a dollar amount to your conversions to be able to compare those numbers with your costs. Ecommerce accounts have it easier since all you have to do is make sure[…]

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[…]

Hi Everyone! I’m Brooke Townsend, and I’m what I like to call myself a “marketing minority.” I have been working as an in-house PPC Manager for Invitations by Dawn for about 3.5 years, and have loved (almost) every minute of it. Invitations by Dawn is an e-commerce wedding invitations and stationery company. Putting e-commerce and[…]

At Granular, we try to share as much useful information about the PPC world as we can. It’s a passion that we’re proud to have, but we acknowledge our views are just one perspective. PPC advertisers at agencies typically work with several clients that can expand across a variety of industries. We’re not used to working on[…]

Google held their annual GPS Summit in the end of May. We got to hear about all the new features coming to AdWords, and one of those features is currently in active beta for select accounts. I’m talking about Expanded Text Ads. This post will explain what is changing and what actions you may need to take going[…]

Display campaigns in AdWords are a great way to boost awareness for either your brand or a specific product or service. However if you’re new to this campaign type, you could end up spending a lot of money showing your ads to the wrong audience. Here are three simple ways you can create a better-performing[…]

May 24th was what we at Granular called, “The Oscars for our industry.” It’s the Google event we never want to miss as we get to hear about all the new features that are planned to roll out for AdWords. This year did not disappoint. While we won’t get to everything they covered, here are the[…]

Just like us, Facebook is a data-driven company. They don’t make decisions lightly and rely on deep statistical insights to make business decisions. One of their latest decisions was to roll-out a new product that helps businesses chat with customers with the help of automation. The need for this and the supporting data behind the[…]

Last week, I got to attend HeroConf in Philadelphia. If you’re not familiar with the conference it is the largest conference in the world that only focuses on paid search. It was a great chance to catch up with my PPC friends from around the world, moderate a whole day of breakouts, and get to[…]

I’ve been implementing Gmail ads for all of my clients lately to test out an under-utilized way of getting in front of new users. With my clients at Granular, Gmail campaigns have been one of the most successful Display campaigns I’ve seen in driving new leads. We also still see many advertisers are still unfamiliar[…]

Today we received notification from our Google Agency reps that there is an update made to Ad Rank, Extensions and Bidding. Here is a list of everything they told us is changing. We are improving how we account for the impact of ad formats (ad extensions) in Ad Rank Some Ad Formats can improve your[…]

Don’t worry, your supply of $0.24 Ramen and  is still available. It just appears that someone or a system accidentally listed a lot of Walmart locations as permanently closed. In an attempt to find some cheap folding chairs for Granular in Milwaukee, Walmart was naturally on the short list of stores. Upon searching, we discovered[…]

Remarketing isn’t anything new anymore. It’s become one of the most common forms of Display advertising within the AdWords platform. Creating audiences in AdWords is fairly simple and is good for creating basic audiences. Google Analytics, on the other hand, allows you to create several, layered audiences that can be used to make your remarketing[…]

There was some big news dropped on the search engine world Friday, February 19, 2016. Google announced that they were changing up the layout of their search engine results page (SERP). This layout definitely affects PPC marketers since there are now fewer ads on the page. This layout also affected SEO marketers because organic results[…]

As a digital marketer I’m always trying to implement new ways to connect with my target audience. I consistently see positive results from my campaign performances when I’m building visitors’ confidence every step of the PPC path. An easy way to build that confidence is through proof points. I look at proof points as evidence that backs[…]