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 […]
Marketing Tools and the Bread Machine Problem Read More »
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
Turning Web Design Upside-down Read More »
Click on the image for a big version, suitable for framing. My colleague Kris wrote a fine post a couple of weeks ago on the importance of online reviews for local business, and how to get them. Following that post, we did a little research to figure out how reviews get passed around between major
How Reviews Flow Around the Web Read More »
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?
What Percentage of Search Is Local? Read More »
Google Ads “Related-To” Links and the Importance of Negative Keywords We have come across a number of instances recently where Google is broad matching terms that are barely related to the keywords we are buying. In some cases, the commercial intent of the broad match term is a complete miss with what our intent is
Be Warned: Google Broad Match Keeps Getting Broad-Matchier Read More »
Hardly anyone goes past the first page of Google results, so you want your ads to show up on the first page, right? That’s why Google prominently displays the minimum first page bid in the AdWords interface, right? Wrong. One of the things we do here at Two Octobers is to audit PPC accounts to
SEM: Why You Shouldn’t Care About Minimum First Page Bid Read More »