Thinking “Outside the Google Bubble” When It Matters Most

Pretty much every company has a seasonality calendar depicting a forecasted High and Low conversion cycle. Since Google dominates the space, it only makes sense to increase budgets and expand the visibility of top products and service. However, Adwords is not the only option that is available to advertisers. In fact, there are many other platforms that advertisers can leverage to get the most bang for their buck. In this post, I will talk about the importance of creating a diverse strategy that gets advertisers away from the Google Bubble.

Quotable Quotes from Marc Poirier

Marc PoirierIt’s been a busy week for Marc Poirier. He’s in London right now, and has just finished wrapping up a session as a presenter at SMX London. And in the meantime, he’s had quite a few requests from the media asking him his expert opinion on a variety of issues.

Never one to shy away from an opportunity to share his thoughts, he’s been quoted quite extensively this week in some great articles from some of our favorite publications.

For starters, Paula Bernstein from AdWeek asked Marc about how Acquisio helps marketers respond to the need for in-depth analysis tools that help them to respond to market trends before the competition does. From the article:

“It’s key to enable people to see not only what’s going on, but to act on it,” says Marc Poirier, CMO of Acquisio.

You can read the full article here.

Just today, The Drum, a marketing and media publication in the UK sought out Marc’s comments on General Motors’ decision to pull their ads from Facebook. While at SMX, he had a chance to sit down with a reporter from their publication and discuss what seems to be a real missed opportunity for GM. In the article, Marc is quoted as saying:

“You also want to see the contribution of Facebook ads beyond the last click only, so attribution plays a role here.”

You can read the full article here.

Cynthia Clark over at 1to1Media wrote a great article this week on the shortage of analytics talent, and issue that could become a real stumbling block to the future of digital marketing businesses if not addressed quickly, and with a forward-thinking strategy in mind. Adding to the article on what companies should be looking from their analysts, Marc said:

“You want them to be able to not only relate to your problems, but also have enough creativity and initiative to suggest paths to finding new solutions.”

You can read the full article here.

And, finally, we had a really great write up in AdWeek about our company and the services that we’re offering. The article is called Improving the Agency’s View, and outlines the capabilities of our platform, as well as the level of advancement that agencies can achieve with Acqusio.

“Agencies need good tracking so they can tell why, when and how a conversion occurs,” Poirier notes. “Because we see every ad impression a person is exposed to, when a conversion happens, we are able to go back and see all of the events that led up to the conversion. It gives marketers the tools to assign credit to all of the events that resulted in the conversion, including Facebook and display ads.”

You can read the full article here.

There’s a lot more great stuff coming up, and we’re always excited to be able to share some insights into the world of marketing. With Marc’s passion for online marketing, his vast knowledge of the space, and his ability to break down complicated ideas into very simple terms so that all of us can understand, I’m quite sure that we’re going to be seeing a lot more of this.

Stay tuned for more great stuff from Acquisio!

Search, Analytics, Social Media and Acquisio at SASCon Event!

The north of England is playing host to a fantastic conference this month. SASCon is all about search, analytics and social media, and will be bringing together the best digital marketing experts in the UK in Manchester on 17th and 18th May. It is being organised by a number of excellent agencies, with support from both SEMPO and Manchester Digital so is sure to be a superb event.

I will be attending the conference along with my Acquisio colleagues, as well as giving my views as a panel member for the Cutting Edge Search Technology session, running from 14.15 to 15.15 on 18th May. Both Acquisio and I hail from a search background, so I have first-hand insight into how the channel has evolved and broadened over recent years to become the digital linchpin it is today.

I’ll be letting you know a little more about the panel session and the other fantastic topics being covered next week. In the meantime, please do let me know if you would like to meet up during the event.

Click through to find out more about SASCon here.

Google Breaks Down Quality Score – Opportunity for Automation and Alerts?

I just finished reading another excellent blog post by Andrew Goodman from Page Zero Media

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that apparently, a few days ago Google, announced they will implement a new way to report on Quality Score by breaking it down into 3 components: Expected CTR, Ad Creative, and Landing Page Quality.

This has been a long time coming, and the implications for Acquisio and our customers are far reaching – finally advertisers will have direct feedback on which part of their ad strategy is causing issues with quality score, which as you probably know is an important determinant for success – including the price paid for clicks.

Imagine preparing a new campaign and learning ahead of time that your expected CTR will be lower than average for specific keywords? Or that your landing page quality for specific ads is below average? So many headaches avoided.

I can’t wait to design new campaign rules and alerts to help you take full advantage of this new data in AdWords.

 

The Healthy Consolidation in the SEM Landscape

Originally posted May 4th, 2012 by Andrew Goodman on his blog.

Rock stars need to dance better than this or they'll get no respect, no respect at all.

For years, SEO companies and “rock stars” have whined that they don’t get the respect they deserve.

That’s been unsurprising, given that you trip over seven unethical SEO firms and two “cheesy borderline” SEO firms out of every group of ten. If only 10% of SEO firms are really “agencies” that adhere to some professional standards (including a degree of transparency, contemporary technology & practices, etc.), how can clients figure out what to do and who to hire?

What You Need to Know About Measuring Social Media

Credit: Social On Main

So social media has gone mainstream. No seriously: MAINSTREAM.

How do I know? Well, aside from the fact that every second piece of print or outdoor advertising seems to have a “Like” icon somewhere on it, Google has fully incorporated social tracking into Google Analytics. And that means that social media is so much more closer to being fully trackable and attributable as a source of traffic in the sales funnel.

So what does this mean for your business (or your clients’)? Well, it means that you can now understand how social is affecting is affecting your bottom line online.

And there are two ways it’s doing that: search rankings and actual conversion rankings….

How Today’s Marketers Can Respond to The Growth of Interactive Marketing

A lot of marketers, it seems, are getting excited about the abilities of combining Display with Search marketing. So much so that we’re being inundated with requests to explain the process, and to give some background on how it works, and how one can get involved….

Adwords Advertisers Beware: Google Changes Ad Rotation Settings To Get More Clicks

We are starting to see a trend emerging from planet Google and it seems to take advantage of those advertisers who are not “super-savvy” with their platform’s “bells and whistles.” Most recently, Google announced a change in their Keyword Matching Settings in which it expands the traditional “phrase” and [exact] match rules to include misspellings, singular/plural forms, stemmings, accents, abbreviations and other variants <– (this one needs to be monitored).

The reason for concern here is that for some advertisers, this will increase traffic and of course SPEND….

Questions And Answers from The Search Marketing Agency Guide to Selling Display to Clients Webinar

Recently we held a free webinar on The Search Marketing Agency Guide to Selling Display to Clients. There were some great questions asked from all the attendees, and while we did our best to cover them all, we finally ran out of time! As promised, we’ve gone through the questions we weren’t able to get to, and we’ve answered them below.

If you weren’t able to attend the webinar, you can watch The Search Marketing Agency Guide to Selling Display to Clients recording now….

The Big Data Management Webinar

There’s one thing that we all have in common: We have a LOT of data to deal with. With each new channel, every new tool, with each new metric we discover and analyze, and with every new client, customer, or prospect, there are reams and reams of data to go through and try to make sense of.

And if you don’t manage your data properly from the beginning, it can become an unwieldy beast, cutting vast swaths right out from underneath your agency’s bank of time….