It is not every day you see SEM companies featured in Wall Street Journal articles but a few weeks ago, they ran a story named Small Businesses Search in Vain for Web-Ad Help. It isn’t good. It calls out two very large SEM companies named ReachLocal and Yodle as not delivering on their promises to […]

This article has been updated with more details and news from the event. During the livestreamed keynote at Google Marketing Live in San Jose, California, on Tuesday, Google executives announced several initiatives, all of which are powered by machine learning and take automation to another level. It’s easy to start being glib about yet more […]

Pay-per-click (PPC) practitioners with mediocre skills simply maintain accounts. Average practitioners step up the game a little by optimizing accounts. The truly effective pro, however, has the critical ability to scale and grow search accounts in an organized and calculated manner. Those top performers can increase budgets and maintain a return on investment (ROI) because […]

Figuring out how your company will grow is one of the biggest challenges facing marketers. The playbook is clear: Choose a high-value audience, execute relevant and creative campaigns, and voilà, results and growth for your brand, product or service. But setting your marketing team up for success is tougher than ever. One reason is that, […]

Amazon used to just do books, but now they do more or less everything. Aside from every imaginable retail product, they also provide video, groceries, music and cloud computing, and they’ve even opened a few physical bookstores. It was just a matter of time before they launched an advertising platform as well. For US readers, […]

A challenge in the search industry is that typically advertisers only have access to a single data set (their own). Competitive insights allow advertisers to benchmark individual performance against industry or category averages. For senior decision-makers in digital, this intelligence can be used to refine, iterate and optimize search campaigns. This benchmark report from Adthena […]

While it’s critical for advertisers to measure and track the traffic driven from their ads, there’s always been something of a tradeoff because the technical processes involved could slow down page-loading time. Now, with this week’s parallel tracking announcement, this tradeoff may no longer be a factor for AdWords advertisers. If your AdWords account leverages […]

In this lively paid search session, each of the Mad Scientist speakers brought fresh ideas, data and insight to our fast-paced world of paid search and consumer intent. Here is an overview of what they shared. Here are some of his findings: Andy estimates that 20 percent of exact match traffic came from close variants […]

If a pay-per-click (PPC) account and the advertiser’s business model are functioning reasonably well, we often find that a business owner becomes heavily dependent on the PPC channel. “Max the volume!” and “We’re down from last year, I’m very worried” are typical (if vague) remits from clients and bosses deep in the thrall of this […]

Humor aside, Wanamaker wasn’t joking. And the challenge still remains with brands struggling to accurately capture the performance of their online ad campaigns amidst a fragmented array of marketing touch points. But the price of assumption-driven marketing is high, and, even with a plethora of digital tools now at their disposal, marketers often don’t have […]