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  • Behavioral Marketing: Cool to Creepy

    Behavioral Marketing: Cool to Creepy

    While on a deadline once, I was working at my computer till 2:00 a.m. When I got back to my computer at 5:00 a.m., it was offering me ads for sleep aids. This is behavioral marketing: targeting ads according to people’s behavior online. You’ve been shopping for climbing gear, so Facebook serves you ads about…

  • Clicks, Customers, and Conversions

    Clicks, Customers, and Conversions

    We had an email from a client recently asking about clicks. We built their website, and in the past year they’d been working with a company that took care of advertising for them. This company was promising 125 “clicks” a month if they re-upped for another year. Was this good, our client was wondering? Should…

  • Paid or Organic Search, by Keywords

    Paid or Organic Search, by Keywords

    Michio Kaku wrote that people working toward artificial intelligence, such as a computer program that can handle human language the way humans do, are like people building a tower to the moon. They get all excited about how much taller their tower is becoming, while ignoring the fact that their end goal is as far…

  • Setting a Budget for PPC

    Setting a Budget for PPC

    Setting a budget for PPC (pay per click, like Google ads) can be easy — pay what you feel you can afford. Few advertising options give you this flexibility. But PPC ads have a lot of moving parts, and that can make it hard to determine the best budget for your needs. Paid search, CPC,…

  • Is Your Advertising Being Seen?

    Is Your Advertising Being Seen?

    Advertising traditionally has had one big problem: you pay for potential viewers, not for actual views. That TV station tells you how many viewers they think tune into their show, based on admittedly shaky data from a small segment of viewers who are often self-reporting. The numbers they give you are for potential viewers, and…

  • Where Are Your Customers?

    Where Are Your Customers?

    Recently we were listening to an organization talking about how they wanted to reach out to a younger demographic. They had some ideas about how to make their product more appealing to younger customers and they had good reasons for thinking that this would be a good move for them. When the conversation turned to…