Getting Granular – PPC Blog

Digital Marketing, PPC, eCommerce and Lead Gen

5 Advanced Tricks & Tips for Mastering Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager is a tool that can bring highs and lows. It can lead you down a path of troubleshooting that will take hours for you only to realize you forgot to hit “submit” for your changes. It has the capacity to put you on the top of the world when you set up[…]

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What The NFL Draft Can Teach Search Advertisers About Quality Score

The pressure to win and be #1 is crucial in sports. Athletes and coaches spend numerous hours training, reviewing playbooks and perfecting their skills to be better, stronger and faster than their competitors. For instance, during a football combine, athletes’ skills are judged using key performance indicators like speed during a 40 yard dash, vertical[…]

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3 Things The Pandemic Has Changed In Higher Education PPC

At Granular, we are fortunate enough to work with colleges and universities across the nation. We work with both public and private institutions targeting both traditional and non-traditional students. As such, we’ve been able to gain a lot of insight into higher ed trends during the coronavirus pandemic. Here are 3 insights we’ve pulled from[…]

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Link Your Facebook Pixel To Your Ads Account For Better Management

As a follow-up to a recent blog post by my colleague, one issue that sometimes arises after you have linked your Facebook ads account to your agency is that the pixel is not properly connected. The Facebook pixel is an essential part of tracking all of your website visitors’ activity from page views to conversions[…]

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Google Shopping Annotations: 7 Options That Make Product Ads Stand Out

A constantly moving task and target in Search marketing is making your ads stand out from the crowd. In crowded search results pages where multiple companies (including you) are selling similar products and services, how do you best communicate what you have to offer and put your best foot forward to earn a click and[…]

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Improve Virtual Event Attendance With LinkedIn’s Sponsored Message Ads

Social media news feeds are crowded and noisy and people scroll through them quickly. While they can and do work for advertising, it’s not exactly a captive audience. But LinkedIn has an ad type that allows you to avoid that. Reach people’s message inbox directly LinkedIn Sponsored Message Ads (formerly InMail) are ads that are[…]

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increase shopping roas

Quickly Increase Your Shopping ROAS With a Script for Trending Queries

Wouldn’t it be great to know faster what users are currently searching for this week compared to the last week and year to year? You could optimize your inventory, bidding and even campaign structure. You’d not only save time for yourself, but could save your clients money!  You may be thinking, “Well I already use[…]

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How I Cut CPCs By -40% In 2 Weeks With Expanded Text Ads

In his book Digital Marketing in and AI World, Frederick Vallaeys makes the point that there are some things machines can do better than humans and there are some things humans can do better than machines. It’s in using the combination of these strengths that we find the best results.     One area where[…]

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How to build a competitor bidding strategy

Google Ads Competitor Bidding: How to Build a Winning Strategy

As a marketing nerd, I love reading about Wendy’s tweets. Why? Because they are always bashing McDonald’s and other fast food chains (and they’re pretty good at it when they do). Wendy’s has mastered using their competitors (and trolling) to get attention. Luckily, you don’t have to master trolling to use your competitors in your[…]

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how to link your facebook account to your agency

How to Link Your Facebook Account With Your Agency’s Business Manager Account

Linking an advertiser’s Facebook account with an agency’s Business Manager account can often be challenging, especially compared with the other common self-serve advertising platforms like Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, or LinkedIn. Often, the linking process happens during the onboarding phase of a client-agency relationship, making any fumbles or false starts even more noticeable as this[…]

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5 New Features That Has LinkedIn Advertising Stepping Up Its Game

If you haven’t noticed yet, the LinkedIn advertising platform has been stepping up its game. Out of all the major digital ad platforms that we deal with (Google, Bing, Facebook, etc.), LinkedIn’s platform and capabilities has historically been the worst in my (and many others) opinion. This is of course outside of the vastly superior[…]

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Micheal Jordan's return

3 Simple Things Michael Jordan’s Return Can Teach Facebook Marketers

  On March 18, 1995 Michael Jordan shocked the world when he faxed the simple and effective press release: “I’m back.” This went viral, before viral was a thing, and perfectly got the message across that he was setting down his baseball bat and rejoining the NBA. The success and simplicity of “I’m back” is[…]

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Insourcing and Outsourcing: What You Should Know About Industry Trends and Patterns

To insource or to outsource? For many businesses, that is an ongoing question. In the past few years, the benefits of outsourcing have been highly touted and embraced by companies of all sizes and in all industries. But insourcing also has a certain appeal. So, how can you choose which option is best for your[…]

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search formats you competitor isn't using

3 Search Formats Your Competitor (Probably) Isn’t Using

As PPC Marketers we are constantly testing new ways to stand out on the SERP. As you probably already know, this involves extensive keyword research, manual bid adjustments, and sometimes even a little luck. But now Google has gifted us with three new awesome formats to make your search campaigns stand out vs your competitor[…]

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How To Organize Your Tasks For Maximum Productivity

In the field of analytics, the great Avinash Kaushik has said “data in aggregate is crap.” Why did he say this? Because when you aggregate numbers, things become blurry. To say your website got a million visits last month might mean something to you, but breaking it down into how that is spread out among[…]

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Be More Productive: How To Deal With Everything On Your Plate

One of the biggest hindrances to productivity is how we feel at any given time. We’ve all said it – “I don’t feel like doing anything today” or “I don’t feel like going to work.” And it’s true, we all need time blocked off to do nothing or do only what we enjoy. But sometimes[…]

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Google Call Ads

Google Changes “Call-Only” Ads to “Call” Ads – Allows for Addition of Website Link

This past week, Google has introduced a change to their call-only ads. Previously, a call-only campaign would show on a mobile device with the only option being to call the business directly from the ad. With this change, while the primary action in the headline is still calling the business, there is now an additional[…]

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google sheets featured

Google Sheets: An Apology

For too long, I disregarded Google Sheets as a poor man’s Excel. I’d grown up with excel – from making tables in 5th grade to learning advanced linear programming in my Supply Chain degree courses. Google Sheets didn’t have the processing power, the features, the familiarity. And in some respects, it still doesn’t. There’s no[…]

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Best of MKE french fries

The Definitive Ranking of Milwaukee’s Best French Fries

Here at Granular, we’ve read countless articles and have had many heated discussions about who has the best French fries in Milwaukee. Being data-driven individuals, we always took issue with the methodologies we read about from other sources. So naturally, we had to take matters into our own hands and bring you the definitive list[…]

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How To Plan To Be Productive: 5 Steps To Doing What Matters Each Day

Sometimes you get to the end of the day and say “I didn’t get anything done that I wanted to get done today!”  Sometimes that’s unavoidable.  Life happens.  But I’d argue that most of the time, it IS avoidable. To be as productive as you can be, you can’t just work your way down a[…]

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MPT for paid search

Using the Modern Portfolio Theory for Paid Search

Paid search is basically the stock market. They both boil down to making investments to maximize return hopefully with a minimum amount of risk. By investing more time into important economic theories, we can better figure out how to optimize returns and lower overall risk. Modern Portfolio Theory is one of the most important and[…]

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PPC Agency's role duringn pandemic-3 Thoughts

What is a PPC Agency’s Role During a Pandemic? Three Thoughts.

“What is our competition doing right now?” “We don’t want to come off as tone-deaf or insensitive with our ads.” “We don’t want sales to tank, but orders are down due to COVID-19. I don’t think pausing all ads is the right thing to do, but we can’t keep spending what we were. What do[…]

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Optimizing Your Google Shopping Feed in 2020

With the advent of machine learning & automated bidding, you may be wondering what tools merchants can use to push their products for relevant queries.  Say for example, if every merchant is using automated bidding for a particular search query, how does Google choose who shows up and who gets their products shown first?  It[…]

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Checklist for Google and Facebook Ads

The Ultimate Google and Facebook Ads Checklist to not Botch Your Campaign Launch

If you work in digital marketing and create campaigns for Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc, you know that you can never check your work enough before launching campaigns. The worst feeling ever is thinking you may have forgotten to set your budgets or that you accidentally targeted the entire United States when you only meant to[…]

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why are my google shopping ad prices wrong?

Why are my Google Shopping Ads Showing the Wrong Price?

If you manage Google Shopping ads and Google Merchant Center product feeds, especially for ecommerce websites that have price changes and dollar- or percent-off sales, then there is a good chance that you have ran into an issue where your Google Shopping Ads display the incorrect price. This can be frustrating if you are counting[…]

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