blog

Paid Media articles

Targeted paid media drives awareness, website visitors, leads, and revenue. Find out more about search advertising, social media advertising, and more by exploring our resources below. Need more? Explore Two Octobers’ paid media management services.

Engagement as a Proxy for Conversion Rate

Can engagement metrics be used as a proxy for conversion rate when optimizing advertising campaigns? When we manage advertising campaigns, whether they be in Google Ads, Facebook, or elsewhere, we strive to drive as many leads or sales as possible. Doing this usually includes setting bids or budgets based on an expected conversion rate. For

Read More »

The Mind of the Searcher

I was recently working with a client and struggling with a profoundly low conversion rate coming from search ads. The keywords we were buying were on target, the ads were performing well, and the landing pages appeared well designed. Then I tried to put myself inside the mind of the searcher. When I did that,

Read More »

5 Google Ads Default Settings That Suck

Most of my friends know I’ve been involved in search marketing for a long time, so I’m often asked to look over Google Ads campaigns to see why they aren’t performing well. People even pay me to do this. The very first thing I do when I look over an account is to check for

Read More »

Marketing Tools and the Bread Machine Problem

I’ve spent much of the last 10 years building tools that automate online marketing tasks. Early on, I had a grand vision of creating an application that would perfectly distribute marketing investment based on an advertiser’s ROI goals. But along the way, I met a few, very smart people who changed my thinking. Before I get

Read More »

Turning Web Design Upside-down

Think of a website like a storefront. No one loves analogies more than I do. I’ve even used analogies to explain analogies. But sometimes they can be dangerous. If an analogy provides a mental model that mostly fits, it can blind a person to important truths. A website is like a storefront, and it is

Read More »

What Percentage of Search Is Local?

I’ve had a hard time finding a good answer to this question: what percentage of searches on web search engines such as Google and Bing are local? I’ve heard wildly different statistics, possibly due to the fact that “local” is a difficult concept to define. Is a search for an area code a local search?

Read More »