If you haven’t read Rand Fishkin’s What if Performance Advertising Is Just an Analytics Scam? then I’d highly recommend you do. It’s a near-perfect archetype of the sort of issues that get raised by someone who knows just enough about performance marketing to know the contentious areas, but not enough…

When it comes to building pages to rank in organic search, you’re usually limited by one of a few factors. You might be limited by resource, in which case you can only afford to build pages for a few key terms. …

By scraping data from keyword planner, you can use calculus to work out the maximum possible profit from a paid search campaign. — Let’s say you’re looking to launch a new paid search campaign. It could be a new campaign for an existing brand, or you could be launching a brand on paid search for the first time. …

With keywords covered, let’s now look at ads, and the role they play in paid search. For a brief refresher, ads appear on a search results page (SERP) when a keyword in the same ad group wins an auction. If there’s only on ad in the ad group, that ad…

If you browse any sort of online forum about digital advertising, there’s one piece of advice that routinely gets offered to new Facebook advertisers. It goes something like: When you’re starting out, your pixel doesn’t have any historical conversion data. …

If you’ve been following along, you should by now know that there are these rather important things in paid search called keywords. They exist in ad groups (which in turn exist in campaigns), and they define what search terms you bid in. Let’s stop here for a second and make…

Uber’s ad troubles aren’t recent news. As early as the start of 2020, there were stories coming out about how they’d realised they’d wasted huge multi-million dollar budgets on fraudulent ads. For some reason, these stories only received limited attention at the time, and mostly just from within the marketing…

Just like auctions, account structure is often seen as one of the less sexy topics within paid search. This is a huge shame though, as how you structure your account is arguably one of the most fundamental and impactful decisions you can make while running paid search. But first: What is an account structure? A…

Auctions may seem an unusual place to start a guide on paid search, but understanding how they work is critical to understanding just about every aspect of the topic. They’re the fundamental mechanism which paid search operates by, and so much best practice is a direct consequence of auction mechanics. Where do auctions come in? …