Earlier this month, I was at Turing Fest – a two-day marketing/tech conference in Edinburgh.
Whenever I go – this is my third year in a row – I feel like I’m behind enemy lines. For three reasons…
#1: I’m much older than most of the attendees. That sucks. Get off my lawn.
#2: I work with “real businesses,” while most attendees work for start-ups. You know, the sort of tech company that creates (more…)
Perhaps the dumbest question in internet marketing is, “Does anyone click on the Google ads?”
Now, if I were sarcastic, I might answer, “No, that’s why Google doesn’t make any money…”
Seriously, folks, it’s not hard to answer this question. After all, Google’s a publicly traded company, which means they report their profits.
For example, in 2015, Google’s revenue was roughly $75bn. Of that, $52bn came from ads on Google’s own websites.
So, let me ask you, (more…)
This isn’t a rant about Bing. I don’t care about them either way.
Instead, this is a lesson about one of the most important principles in business: Leverage.
Let me explain …
According to the most recent data, Google has (more…)
I’m going to give you some advice on how to work with marketers.
But, before I get to the advice, I have to set it up with a story.
The story is about Wilhelm Steinitz, the first ever world chess champion, and it goes like this…
Steinitz was playing a game against another top player. After the game, the players went over the game. They discussed different ideas, and alternative moves that weren’t played.
While they were doing this, an unskilled amateur – in chess parlance, a “patzer” – kept interrupting and telling the masters what moves they should have played.
Steinitz, put up with this for as long as he could. But, finally, he snapped. He turned to the patzer and asked, “Sir, have you ever seen a monkey examine a watch?”
I was recently hired by a company to improve their PPC results. They were paying around £60 per lead, which was roughly breakeven. We set a target to get that down to £45.
So, I reworked their AdWords account and, straight off the bat, we were down to under £45 per lead. (more…)
Imagine you have an unknown product, and your goal is to become the world leader within 4 years….
Even though you don’t have much money …
And your product really isn’t any better than your competitors’ …
And, on top of that, your product is twice as expensive as everyone else’s …
Do you think you could succeed?
In the early 1900s, the creator of Pepsodent was in exactly this position.
And, when he approached Claude Hopkins – the greatest ad man of the time – Hopkins thought the project was hopeless (more…)
When I was first introduced to AdWords in the summer of 2006, I was hooked instantly.
That’s because I knew about direct marketing and realised that AdWords was nothing more than a delivery mechanism for a direct marketing message.
Not only that, but unlike most forms of direct marketing, PPC was quicker, simpler, more flexible, cheaper, and easier to measure.
What used to take months could now take days. You could write a new ad today, test it against your existing ad, and within a few days, have a clear idea of whether the new ad was better, or worse.
And that meant you could improve your ROI rapidly – and for almost zero cost.
Here we are 10 years later, and I decided to mark this anniversary by sharing 10 of the biggest lessons I’ve learned about AdWords.
Let’s start with that first lesson: (more…)
Let me let you into a secret: You could have the hottest hotshot pay per click manager in the world… and still not be able to compete in your market at PPC.
By “compete”, I mean be one of the top 2-3 advertisers that hoover up the vast majority of clicks.
Why not?
The reason… as the headline suggests… is that the true secret to PPC success has little to do with PPC. (more…)
Last week, Matt Umbro wrote a post called, “Why SMBs Should Not Run AdWords Accounts”. Before I give my response (Spoiler! I don’t agree), we have to define what an SMB is. Matt’s definition is a business that spends less than $500 a month on clicks. So let’s use that. Read more…
Ad blockers are on the rise. According to the Guardian (Nov 2015), 18% of British web users now use ad blockers. That’s up from 15% just a few months earlier. This stat has caused a lot of nervousness in the internet advertising world. But I’m not worried. You might expect Read more…
After I published my recent book (get a free copy here), some people asked whether it was really possible for businesses to double profits in just a few months. The answer is yes. Let me show you how. Let me show how these gains come from applying just 3 simple Read more…
