The availability heuristic: 7 ways Google Ads can steer your decisions
What gets your attention in Google Ads can influence where you spend, what you change, and how you judge performance. Here's what to watch.
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Andrew Goodman's latest articles
Why frontloading your ad spend usually backfires
Launching with a bigger budget doesn't guarantee faster growth. Here's how to build momentum without wasting spend.
AI Mode is Google’s next ads engine — and it already knows how to monetize it
As AI Mode expands, ad formats, reporting, and control are starting to take shape, with Google playing a long game competitors can’t match.
Search Engine Marketing & Economic Recovery: Don’t Get Caught Flat-Footed In 2010
My cat, Walter, runs under the bed when he hears footsteps—even if it’s only the mailman. Being risk-averse to that degree doesn’t make Walter a rational maximizer, so he’d probably make a poor tournament player in bridge or poker. But it does make him a survivor. Natural selection works on the principle of “better,” not […]
The Long Tail of Paid Search Account Effort
If you spend enough time sitting at your desk in summer, you can go slightly insane. That aside, daydreaming sometimes leads to back-door observations, studies show. Glancing out the window, it’s evident that it takes a lot of resources and coordination to run a neighborhood. Schools, crossing guards, street sweepers, garbage collection, public pool maintenance, […]
Bid Management Automation: Fraught with Questionable Assumptions
Today, there’s no viable “con” position in the “paid search bid management” debate. Either you sing the praises of automated bid management, or you’ll be asked to sit in a dark corner (or cave) and contemplate what possessed you to enter the digital marketing arena. Unfortunately, there are few real debates on the advantages and […]
AdWords Landing Page Quality Refresher
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” This gem from heavyweight boxing legend Iron Mike Tyson also applies to AdWords account strategy, especially when starting a new account. Beginning in 2006, some advertisers in the affiliate marketing, Made-for-AdSense, and other spheres have referred to harsh quality score treatment — especially treatment […]
Website EKG A Must for ROI
I was casually chatting with a super-savvy Web 2.0 friend – we’ll call him Mac – about a website I work closely with. We’d spent the last year overhauling the strategy and the design of the site, though there are still several features waiting to be built, and the content growth is just at the […]
The Mysteries of Ad Quality Revealed (Yet Again)
Perhaps it was lucky fate that Anders Hjorth (of Relevant Traffic, a European SEM agency) and I didn’t have too much time to compare notes going into the panel “Tuning Ads for Quality Score” at SMX Stockholm last week. Fortunately, the presentations didn’t overlap too much. The interesting thing is the overlapping conclusions we drew […]
Google Website Optimizer, Pensive Riffs: A Meeting of the Minds
Part one of this article is here. “Big money goes around the world” – Rush When we left off, I had shared the results of a first test for the home page of a small business ecommerce site. My colleagues and I went through a systematic process to work with the business owners (like us, […]