“Which bidding strategy should I use?” That’s a question all digital advertisers need to answer if they want their Google and Bing ads to show. That can be pretty daunting. Manual or automated? Semi-automated? What does automated fully entail? Are you guaranteed results? The one you choose can be the deciding factor between...

Time and time again we see it: new contacts come to us and don’t really know how to assess the health of their Google Ads account.  It’s an understandable problem. There is a lot of complexity when it comes to running accounts, and if you’re not in the weeds every day learning new strategies it can be hard to keep up.  Right now...

Hey There Click-Through-Readers! Have you noticed anything BIG in the Google SERPs lately? Google is testing blowing up the first ad headline and it dramatically changes the look of things. We cover this in our top story this week. I believe if this sticks there will be much to learn about the importance of how we write first...

Hey Click-Through-Readers! Well, it’s August...that happened. I am not sure where the time is going in 2020 but this is the last PSL-free month of the year so live it up (while maintaining 6+ feet of distance!). Q3 is in full swing, and major retailers like Target and Walmart have announced they will not be having in-store Black...

Query Mapping is the process of identifying and controlling which campaigns / ad groups / keywords search queries are showing in. The goal is to have a perfect 1:1 ratio, but that is almost never possible due to things like closer variants and Google selecting their favorite keywords based on performance. That 1:1 ratio means when...

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is often the best place for companies to start advertising since search is high intent and the traffic is usually high quality. However, depending on your industry, paid search might not be cheap. And for those who have a relatively small budget, it can be even harder to compete with the big fish....

Hello Click-Through-Readers! This week we are going there with an article about TikTok advertising, but don’t worry I won’t share any awkward dance videos. Also, in case you live under a rock you probably know that this is a presidential election year - meaning social media feeds are about to get blown up with political ads. Our...

Hey Click-Through-Readers! You have survived half of 2020 and are taking the time to read our news recap - I am honored to share it with you. Thank you! One of the notable stories this week is a startup accelerator program by Google that is designed for women-founded startups. We share the details and have a link for your business...

Happy almost three day weekend Click-Through-Readers! The fireworks in my city have been canceled, which is great news for my two golden retrievers and all the neighborhood dogs. They might not have noise-induced anxiety this weekend, but I will still be dressing them up in red, white, and blue bandanas and forcing them to take...

Before making a big change to a Google Ads campaign, it might be a better idea to set it up as an experiment. This allows us to see how the change actually impacts performance in a true test environment. If you want to test a different landing page, an experiment is a good way to set it up if you can’t conduct it on the landing...

Ad customizers can be extremely useful when running campaigns for multiple geos, or for running similar ad copy for multiple categories.  When running a massive account with thousands of ads, ad customizers allow you to personalize a general ad template without having to build out individual ads for every single ad group.   What...

Welcome Click-Through-Readers to another week of marketing news. As businesses continue to open up slowly, there are more areas popping up where I am seeing permanent changes from both COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter. I would argue that the tables at restaurants have never been cleaner, being sanitized before being seated. A...

Over the last couple months, you’ve probably tested (or have been pressured to test by your Google rep) Google’s Discovery Ads. But have you seen a significant impact on conversions come as a result of this? For those of you who are not familiar with discovery ads yet, let’s take a step back. What are discovery ads? Discovery ads...

Hello Click-Through-Readers. We took a week off from publishing to create room for more important voices. This week is a double stack of news for both weeks. We strive to continue being a source of paid marketing news to help you with ‘what you need to know’ for work and business.  Here is the news for the weeks of 6/1/2020 and...

Google allows for two types of Shopping campaigns: Smart Shopping and Manual Shopping. With all things Google pointing in the direction of automation, it comes to no surprise that Google favors Smart Shopping campaigns over manual.   While making a marketer’s job much easier in terms of less manual work, automation still does have...

Quality score is the key to a cost-effective search advertising campaign and maximizing return on ad spend (ROAS). Unfortunately, for such an important metric, the Google Ads UI is very limited in the data that it provides and the tracking options available. Why is Quality Score Important? Quality score is a rating based on how...

Signs of Spring are everywhere (unless you live in the North East) and as the flowers are blooming, shops and businesses are slowly starting to open up. I can’t wait to go pick up my favorite foods from some of the restaurants in my town that were completely closed during the shutdown. While it might not be the same as being...

The client approval process can be smooth and simple, but sometimes it can be a nightmare. It can be a very tedious process with various stages of approval and sometimes require numerous sets of eyes before the final sign off.  Hours of valuable work time can get lost in the process. Without a formal approval procedure, there is...

Welcome to another week of Click Through Reads! This week is all about the new new. New Facebook reporting, new LinkedIn targeting, new Facebook ad placements.  New is something I wish there was more of when it came to entertainment options in my quarantine life. Have you seen the popular shows on Netflix lately? Tiger King I can...

What are Close Variants? Over the last few years, we’ve seen Google change the way different match types work. The most recent change that we’ve seen is exact match close variants now include same meaning variations and focuses on the intent of the query, which kind of changes the whole point “exact match”…right? Exact match used...