PPC experimentation vs. PPC testing: A practical breakdown
Maximize PPC impact by integrating experimentation with testing tactics, plus tips on using Google and Meta advertising tools effectively.
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Ben Vigneron's latest articles
How to create a roadmap for your PPC clients
Learn the six stages to building a PPC roadmap that delivers business outcomes, from setting goals to scaling and continuous optimization.
Advanced analytics techniques to measure PPC
Key strategies for consent management, data modeling and non-cookie measurement techniques in a privacy-first world.
Incrementality testing in advertising: Who are the winners and losers?
Find out which strategies are undervalued or overvalued and how to optimize your ad spend for maximum impact.
7 must-know marketing attribution definitions to avoid getting gamed
Understand the real definitions of common attribution models and metrics to gain clarity on your marketing performance
3 ways search marketers can prepare for the big cookie crumble
These initiatives will help you optimize targeting, refine media mix, and improve performance reporting without third-party cookie tracking.
5 outdated marketing KPIs to toss and what to reference instead
Are your KPIs holding you back? It's time to rethink traditional marketing metrics and level up your campaign measurement strategy.
How PPC Advertisers Can Best Leverage The Research Period This Holiday Season
Columnist Benjamin Vigneron shares thoughts and data on how to pace your search marketing budget over the course of the holiday season.
How Page Views, Time On Site & Bounce Rate Predict For Changes In Quality Score And Revenue
Columnist Benjamin Vigneron explains how you can use website analytics data to derive insights that you can apply to your paid search efforts.
Mobile Searches Now The Lion’s Share: 5 Tips Not To Miss The Boat
The year of mobile has arrived -- and with it, the need to put as much into your mobile paid search campaigns as your desktop ones. Columnist Benjamin Vigneron shares his tips for evaluating and improving your mobile efforts for better paid search performance.
The Missing Link: 3 Steps For Connecting TV & SEM Performance
Columnist Benjamin Vigneron shares his method for attributing changes in SEM performance over time to multiple internal and external variables.
3 Steps To Optimizing Local Paid Search
Columnist Benjamin Vigneron explains how to localize your messaging and optimize your budget across your best performing locations in Google Enhanced Campaigns.
Tackling AdWords’ New Default Close Variants Matching Behavior
Contributor Benjamin Vigneron explores the new default behavior and finds an efficient negative keyword strategy is more important than ever.
3 Opportunities With Those New Google Shopping Campaigns
For those who are not necessarily familiar with Google Shopping campaigns — let’s clarify things straight away. Product listing ads (PLAs) are remaining the same as an ad format for end users, whether search marketers are using “old PLAs” or new Shopping campaigns. The novelty lies only on the campaign management side of things, including […]
5 Steps To Leverage Those AdWords Bid Simulations For Maximum Return
Though the basic concepts have remained the same, a lot has changed since Hal Varian released his bidding tutorial back in 2009 (video autoplay), especially with enhanced campaigns and those new mobile and location bid modifiers. One such change is that keyword-level simulations are now available for download in AdWords. For any search marketer interested in marginal […]
3 Tips To Fine-Tune Your Paid Search Program For The Holidays
With Black Friday and Cyber Monday around the corner, it is high time search marketers got their paid search program ready to scale up efficiently. In this column, I’ll outline and dive into three tips you should consider to get the most from the holidays in paid search. From my experience, most of the success […]
How To Use The New AdWords Estimated Cross-Device Conversions
A couple of months after the paid search world had to transition to AdWords Enhanced Campaigns in the name of simplified and more relevant cross-device ad management, we are finally getting some initial food for thought with regard to cross-device performance. I called it the “next frontier for online marketers” in a previous post, and we are now officially getting […]
Segmenting Your Paid Search Program For Improved Manageability
Most direct response marketers either need to meet a given efficiency goal (CPA, ROAS, etc.) or get the most of the budget available — or both combined. The budget and efficiency goals typically vary over time for lots of different reasons, such as seasonal trends and promotion periods, and you need to quickly toggle from […]
5 Steps to Implement a Successful Bidding Strategy in Paid Search
When you set up bidding in paid search, it’s important you put a strategy in place prior to implementation. The most relevant questions that need to be addressed when developing this strategy are as follows: How many bidding strategies do I need? What cookie window should I use? Should I use a revenue-attribution model and […]
Analyzing Cost-Per-Click Inflation In The Marketplace
In any pay-per-click auction environment (like paid search), the average cost-per-click (CPC) represents the result of a complex auction algorithm which includes multiple factors, such as: Competitiveness level Quality Score Bidding strategy Seasonality In a previous post, I approached the competitiveness piece by looking at the ratio between the CPC and max bid in order […]
Smart Geographic Segmentation & Bidding With Enhanced Campaigns
New PPC Best Practices In An Enhanced Campaign World was one of SMX Advanced Seattle’s most engaging sessions; and, as a speaker, I have received a great deal of feedback and questions about those bid location modifiers. As it turns out, location bid modifiers are one of the (only) benefits of upgrading to enhanced campaigns, […]
Analyzing Competitiveness In Your Paid Search Account
The auction-based industry we work in involves a number of metrics which help search marketers identify where they are doing better or worse than the competition. Just to name a few, the most common metrics search marketers usually look at are the Quality Score (QS), the average cost-per-click (CPC), the impression share (IS), and the […]
How To Determine Your Hourly Bid Multipliers In AdWords
Since I received some solid feedback on my last column detailing how to determine mobile & geo bid multipliers for enhanced campaigns, I thought I’d share some more actionable stuff this time around. While hourly bid multipliers aren’t new, they remain a crucial tactic for optimizing your AdWords campaigns. They work by reducing your ad spend at […]
How To Determine Your Mobile & Geo Bid Multipliers For Enhanced Campaigns
As every search marketer should be aware by now, AdWords enhanced campaigns now allow you to set campaign-level bid multipliers for your mobile impressions, and also by geo. While mobile bid multipliers seem to be more of a step backward compared to mobile targeted campaigns, geo bid multipliers are actually a nice feature and definitely […]
How To Use Regression Analysis To Estimate Incremental Revenue Opportunities
My previous article was about estimating the potential for growth for those paid search campaigns capped due to insufficient budget. This was definitely the easy part since the logic behind the assumptions involved in the calculation was fairly simple. Now, we can address those paid search campaigns capped due to insufficient rank – and there […]
How To Estimate Incremental Revenue Opportunities With Impression Share Data
When looking for opportunities for growth, most search marketers try to find ways to estimate how much they can scale up their paid search effort, and what would be the impact on ad spend, revenue volume, and efficiency. There are lots of different ways to go about this – one way I’d like to cover […]
A/B Testing From Search To Conversion
As I mentioned in a previous post, search marketers should work on finding the middle ground between a high CTR (appealing ads) and a high conversion rate (qualified traffic). This process is trickier than it seems because of the inverse relationship between those two metrics. In this article, I’ll share a couple of thoughts which […]
How To Take Control Over PLAs & Product Search
While there is no shortage of literature on managing product-level keywords and product listing ads (PLAs), it seems that lots of advertisers still struggle with creating the initial structure and its subsequent maintenance over time. If you are an online retailer and your business is significantly dependent on product level keywords and ads, you might […]
A Look At Cross-Domain Search & Conversion
If you are running multiple online marketing programs across multiple websites/domains, then you might have asked yourself the following questions. Are there any interactions between my websites? Are my customers likely to convert across multiple domains? Would those insights potentially alter my customers’ LTV (life-time value) and my goals, as a result? Cross-Domain Clicks & […]
What Makes Paid Search Programs Successful From Search To Conversion?
At a high level, I believe it is fair to say that it has a lot to do with the ability to bid on the right keywords, serve very specific ads tailored to each geo/language/device, and redirect to the most appropriate landing page for each geo/language/device. It’s all about engineering a consistent conversion chain from […]
Two Easy Ways To Leverage The Search Funnel
If you’ve read my previous post about Multi-Touch Attribution & Conversion: Does It Matter?, you should now be aware of whether or not it is worth digging into the conversion funnel by looking at the average lag from impression/click to conversion and, more importantly, the average number of impressions/clicks involved in a conversion. In other […]
Multi-Touch Attribution & Conversion: Does It Matter?
When it comes to multi-touch attribution, I recently realized that most advertisers have pretty much the same questions: How does one know whether it is worth digging into the conversion funnel? What are common patterns from a multi-touch standpoint? How can one actually leverage the conversion funnel? Based on my conversations, here are some answers […]
Ideas To Cover Your Entire Inventory In Paid Search
While it might be the simplest way to drive more impressions, any savvy search marketer (and particularly those in the retail sector) in should be aware that leveraging broad match type is far from the only possibility to scale your PPC program. There are plenty of other options out there –I’ll try to cover just […]
A Look At Cross-Device Search & Conversion
Mobile and Tablet strategy was a heavily discussed topic at SMX Seattle earlier this month. While there were no major revolutionary insights; I did feel that the many of the experts had important general consensuses regarding the non-PC space. Mobile search is exploding in volume and shows no signs of slowing down. As search marketers, […]
New Exact & Phrase Matching Behavior: Early Findings
In a world where lots of search marketers are still reluctant to use broad match type due to its lack of relevance and control, Google has released two features to have more advertisers show their ads on all those very long tail queries: The broad modifier feature was rolled out in July 2010 in the […]
Conversion Rate Optimization In Paid Search: Why Click Through Rate Matters
One might find it strange to talk about click-through rate (CTR) optimization when talking about conversion rate optimization, since these indicators do not initially seem related. Yet, while these metrics are not always correlated, they sometimes – and actually often – are. However, a high click-through rate does not assure a high conversion rate. The […]
Getting Organized: Paid Search, User Intent & The Search Funnel
There is no shortage of literature covering: How to organize a paid search program to reflect your site map and product offerings How to maximize quality score How to categorize queries by user intent (informational, navigational, transactional) Yet, I have not found any literature addressing how to put those three concepts together. In a world […]
The Conversion Chain In Paid Search: Beyond Traditional Key Performance Indicators
A typical way of thinking of a SEM program is to look at multiple metrics individually, such as the average rank, cost per click, click through rate, conversion rate, cost per action, return on ad spend. Analyzing these metrics separately is a good start but does not allow search marketers to get the full picture. […]
Comparing Facebook Like vs. Google +1
Google’s new +1 feature was one of SMX Advanced Seattle most engaging sessions and, as a speaker, I have received a wide variety of feedback and questions. It seems this feature has fomented a great deal of speculation and inquiry. Here is a bit more food for thought. Like vs. Google +1: What Are The […]
Google Instant’s Impact On Trigger Keywords & Performance In Paid Search
From a paid search standpoint, the effects of Google Instant are intriguing. What is the real impact on trigger keywords and other key performance indicators? Here is an attempt to quantify those effects. Methodology We studied an aggregated data set on Google US from the period prior to the launch of Google Instant and compared […]