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.

Paid Search for Brand Keywords: To Bid or Not To Bid?

We’ve long held the belief that bidding on your brand terms in paid search advertising is inadvisable for most advertisers. In order to make your marketing dollars work hardest, we reason, why pay for users who are already aware of your business? Instead, use paid search advertising to attract new prospects who were searching for

Read More »

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 »