Brad Geddes has been involved in PPC since 1998. He is a co-founder of AdAlysis, an ad testing & recommendation platform, and a member of the programming team for SMX events. Brad is the author of Advanced Google AdWords, the most advanced book ever written about Google's advertising program. Brad has worked with companies who manage tens of thousands of small PPC accounts and other companies who spend millions on marketing each month. His experience ranges from owning his own agency, to managing a boutique agency, to overseeing programs that were official resellers of Google and Microsoft. Some brands he has worked with include: Amazon, Yahoo, Google, Thomson Reuters, YP.com, Encyclopedia Britannica, and Salesforce. One of his trademarks has been demystifying the complicated aspects of SEM. Not one to hold secrets, Brad prefers to educate his readers on the various aspects of crafting successful marketing campaigns to ensure the success for all parties involved.
There are times you just want to increase your click-through rates. You might need to raise it to help Quality Scores, increase traffic, or gain visibility for a new product. Often by just raising click-through rates, you might not be raising your conversion rate. You can even decrease your conversion rates with ads. However, we’re […]
When you do AdWords account audits, you need to go beyond the data to see how savvy the AdWords account is overall. If the account is well put together, then the account manager generally knows what they are doing and you will end up talking quite a bit about the data and the account’s strategy. […]
Let’s face it – people just go crazy during the holidays. Your CPCs will increase, but so will your click-through-rates, and your cost per action should even go down even through your CPCs have increased. It’s an insane time full of people who want to find deals. Marketers are willing to oblige and throw offers […]
I was recently talking to a group of consumers (not search marketers) who had some very negative perceptions about a handful of brands. In some cases, they used to be a fan of the brand, or at a minimum would continue buying from that brand. In other cases, they had never purchased from the brand […]
Google’s display network can bring you tremendous amounts of clicks and conversions if used correctly. If it is not used correctly, you can quickly spend mass amounts of money and have nothing to show for it. A couple of years ago, I wrote an article on how to manage the display network so you can […]
Organic search can be an excellent traffic stream that helps your website increase its visibility, find new customers, and ultimately be a nice source of revenue for your company. However, organic traffic has some drawbacks: You can’t easily test landing pages, headlines, and templates You can’t get rapid feedback You don’t get traffic on certain […]
Search engines use a computer program known as a bot to crawl and index the Web. A robots.txt file is an instruction manual that tells a bot what can and cannot be crawled on your site. An improperly configured robots.txt file can: Lower your quality scores Cause your ads not to be approved Lower your […]
Over the past several years, I have done numerous case studies with companies looking at the differences in their paid traffic when they also rank organically for a term. In this column, I’m going to share some of that data and walk you through some simple calculations you can do to see if you should […]
Every PPC manager wants to know how to increase their exposure, especially if they feel there aren’t any new keywords they wish to add. There is a simple way to determine how to increase an account’s exposure that can be accomplished in less than a minute. Generally speaking, when looking to increase your exposure, you […]
Google AdWords has a feature known as topic targeting. This feature allows you to target topics and not necessarily placements or keywords across the Google Display Network. If you just use topic targeting, you will usually receive a lot of impressions; but not necessarily a lot of conversions. It is fantastic for reaching a large […]
Most companies measure paid search based upon revenue targets, ROI goals, and conversion rates. Metrics such as bounce rates are generally left for the web design team to figure out, or the paid search term to obsess about without any clear strategy. In this column, we will examine bounce rates and put them in the […]
When you have two or more keywords that can be triggered in your AdWords account from a search query, Google tries to show the most restrictive option. The constraints go beyond just match type to include geography, time of day, etc. However, Google does not always show exact match over phrase match and phrase match […]
Ad copy testing is essential for anyone running a paid search account. Testing ad copy in accounts in high traffic accounts is fairly easy, as you can add new ad copies to existing ad groups, wait, and then examine the metrics. However, in low volume accounts, testing is not nearly as easy, as it could […]
Every few months, there is an outcry from advertisers because they received the dreaded notification email from Google – their accounts were banned. Some accounts eventually get reinstated, some companies are never allowed to advertise on Google again. There are several reasons AdWords accounts may get banned; however, most accounts are banned for one of […]
At the beginning of each new year, our eyes shift from looking backwards at what we should be doing to exploring new prospects that will arise. It is easy in January to put the previous year behind you and gaze to the future. However, if you have not taken advantage of past opportunities, your future […]
In the past few months, two significant issues have been messing with AdWords quality scores—or at least with how many of us perceive quality scores. Google has developed several bugs in how it displays quality score. Keywords with low quality scores are acting like keywords with high quality scores. Google Quality Score Display Bugs Google’s […]
It is easy to lose sight of your customers when doing keyword research by relying on tools. These tools are not going to spend money with your company; tools just show you the most popular phrases regardless if your customer’s actually use these words or not. One of the best sources for keyword research is […]
Google has made dramatic changes to their AdWords reporting infrastructure. The old reporting system is being retired, and users are being forced to pull reports from the interface. This change has left many unable to find their reports, or know how to extract data from AdWords. In this post, I’ll walk through how to pull […]
If you're a Google advertiser, or use Google Analytics, you may be inadvertently violating some of their privacy policies. When I examined more than 200 sites I found that more than 90% were violating at least one Google privacy policy. Are you?
Google is making changes that require agencies to be more "transparent" in their reports to advertisers. But will this change benefit advertisers—or is it a move by Google to build its own brand and assure customer loyalty? The answers aren't entirely... "transparent."