It's very often the case that a prospect approaches my agency for SEO (search engine optimization) and ends up with Google Ads, or vice versa. Unless you're a search marketing expert it can be difficult to choose what's best or when you should be running both. So, Google Ads vs. SEO, what's best? In this article, I'll run down the pros and cons of each venerable marketing channel. Furthermore, I'll look at some common scenarios where one option is clearly [...]
Is your mandate to reduce spending on Google Ads and lower CPA down to a more affordable level? Here are the 10-steps you can take today to immediately and dramatically reduce your spending and CPA. These are provided in order of greatest to least impact. 1. Stop Low Performing Campaigns Depending on how much you wish to reduce ad spend, you may want to simply pause low performing campaigns completely. Display & video campaigns (other than for remarketing) are great [...]
Google surprised us this month when they suddenly added "optional" extra headline and description fields to Expanded Text Ads (ETAs). While Google had been Beta testing this feature for over a year, we expected more fanfare and buildup. This has obviously created a lot of unexpected work for advertisers, and more so for agencies. In addition, the simultaneous launch of the highly touted Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) further complicates the situation. Today I'm going to break down the new ETA format, [...]
Let's face it, AdWords is complicated. To make matters worse, the platform lacks robust version control and project management tools. While you could always go back in your history log and review changes, scant details and an inability to map changes to performance made the tool lacklustre at best. But that may be changing with some recent updates from the Big G. Today I'm going to introduce you to ad version history and the brand new AdWords notes feature. Now [...]
A big part of assessing what agency or consultant to use includes their pricing model. In this post, I'll discuss the most common PPC pricing models and the pros and cons for each. While there are a lot of exotic hybrid or combination pricing models I'll stick to the basics. The four main PPC pricing options are a percentage of ad spend, fixed price, performance-based, and hourly. I'll run down how each one works in some detail. Percentage of Ad [...]