Paid Search & PPC

Expert Tips, Insights, and Analysis

PPC experts Anna Borchert, Emily Martin and Steve Kroll at conference

Welcome to your hub for Paid Search & PPC know-how. Uncover actionable tips and strategic insights, all scrutinized by industry experts. Navigate the intricacies of cost-per-click, ad auctions, and keyword targeting. Our goal is to turn the complex PPC landscape into a stroll through a well-lit park.

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Competitor Brand Terms

The Temptation of Bidding on Another Company’s Brand Terms in Google Is it wise to bid on a competitor’s brand keywords in Google Ads? For anyone with experience utilizing strategy, it can feel a bit like taking a blow torch to your money when done poorly. But it’s hard to blame anyone for coming to[…]

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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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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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Remote Working Tools Granular Uses

Granular’s Remote Work Tools / Tech Stack At Granular we’ve been setup to work remotely since day one. While most of the team is in Milwaukee, we were built to have a flexible work schedule and be able to be plugged into work from remote places. PPC doesn’t sleep, weekends and holidays need coverage sometimes[…]

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Granular works from home

Granular Team Q&A: Working Remotely

Are you a work from home pro, or beginner? While more and more people are working from home, it’s important to remember that working from home can be very different from working in the office. Our office started to work from home this week, and while some of my coworkers are pros, some of us[…]

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Ad Customizers image

Google Ad Customizers: Part 2

Ad Customizers Part 2 In part one of this three-part blog post, I shared how Ad Customizers are superior to DKI. We are still waiting on statistically significant data to prove our point. In the meantime, below is some helpful information on how to implement. How to Implement To implement these in your own campaigns,[…]

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How to use Gmail Ads for Restaurants

Do Google Gmail Ads Work for Restaurants?

Do Google Gmail Ads Work for Restaurants? Most restaurants I’ve worked with seem to have tried Google Search Ads at some point, and although Search can be successful, common questions I hear are “what else can we do on Google?” and “how do we get new customers?” Surprisingly, I have found that most brands have[…]

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beyond the standard kpis-ppc success

PPC Success Beyond the Standard KPIs

The success of PPC campaigns is more than just what you see in the interface There are always challenges when running any successful paid search campaign. Most of the time, people will look at the data right in front of them when attempting to address a challenge they are facing. Sometimes, the answers can only[…]

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Quality Score Poem

Love Poem to Quality Score

In paid advertising, we all know the pains of quality score. We work incredibly hard with our clients to get their website to reflect exactly what their business does. Then we write ad copy based on those landing pages and our keywords need to be the most relevant to the user. But sometimes no matter[…]

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Ad Customizers

Google Ad Customizers: Part 1

Google Ad Customizers: Part 1 At a former agency, I worked on a PPC account that was so geographically segmented that we targeted such hot spots as Twin Falls, Idaho (population <50,000), and separated out Orem, UT from Provo, UT (a distance of less than 5 miles). This account was terribly under-managed, because most of[…]

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Waze Advertising: The Eulogy

Updated: June 30, 2023 It will be missed… If your business was in the right category (gas station, restaurant, coffee shop, bank, auto dealer, grocery store, or any niche business with an offline location) Waze was filled with amazing advertising opportunities, heck just look at some of earlier coverage of their features and updates. But[…]

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Is Digital Advertising A Bubble That’s Going To Pop?

I know a way to make your PPC ads out-of-this-world effective. Just make sure you show them to people that are going to buy anyway! 🙂 In this recent blog post, it was suggested that online advertising is a bubble, and that sooner or later people are going to figure out that all the money[…]

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A Way To Build Google Ads Campaigns For The Holidays Fast

Sometimes the holidays creep up on us (and our clients!) quickly.  While our typical approach to an account is to take our time and incrementally build out campaigns as we meet performance goals and focus on quality over quantity, the holiday season brings upon us a whole different set of circumstances.  Businesses are in the[…]

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The Google Ads Automated Rules Setting That Can Screw Up Everything

Automated rules are good for situations where you know you’re going to need to make changes at some point in the future based on some criteria like performance or time. For example, you might increase or decrease a bid on a keyword if it meets certain performance thresholds. Or you might want to pause campaigns[…]

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6 Google Ads Scripts Every Account Should Be Using

I’m writing this the day after Halloween, which may be the perfect time to talk about Google Ads scripts since it’s a fairly scary subject to most people dealing with accounts.  But let me tell you…it doesn’t have to be.  With such an amazing, sharing community all around us, PPCers aren’t on their own…ever.  Trust[…]

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Book Review: Digital Marketing in an AI World

Some would say we’re not significantly affected by the media we consume. I don’t claim to be one of them. After watching a lot of the movies being put out these days that show futuristic visions of how artificial intelligence might be incorporated into the world in the future, I can’t help but wonder how[…]

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Stop Getting Sold On “Geo-Fencing”

Synergy, change agents, deep dive, circle back, boiling the ocean, ping me – remember some of these cringe-worthy business buzzwords? Business is full of them, and yes I admit, I still use some of these words from time to time. What is it about business that gets us stuck on meaningless one-liners and platitudes devoid[…]

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instagram in-app purchase

What In-App Check Out in Instagram Means for Your Paid Media Campaigns

For a little while now, Facebook has been pushing its Marketplace section as a sort of Craigslist killer. There are quite a lot of listing and a decent amount of traffic inside Facebook’s Marketplace system. But it hasn’t caught on the way Facebook hoped. While the Facebook Marketplace is not going anywhere, as of now.[…]

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3 Strategies to Drive eCommerce Sales

3 Strategies to Drive eCommerce Sales

With the advent of quick-to-market ecommerce platforms like Shopify, Big Commerce, and Squarespace (just to name a few) there are more people jumping into the world of ecommerce every day. While it’s possible to grow an organic footprint for an ecommerce brand, PPC and paid media continue to be the driving force behind ecommerce sales.[…]

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video advertising PPC

Change How You Think About Video – Part 4

Check out previous blogs in this series Think of digital content as gas in your car’s gas tank. The more content you create, the farther you can go on a single tank. In this metaphor, PPC campaigns are your car – your means of conveyance. A car without any gas renders it useless. On the[…]

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5 Non-Lead KPIs B2B Digital Marketers Shouldn’t Forget About

Leads, leads, leads!  It’s the cry of B2B marketers everywhere, and for good reason.  But consider this…do you try to force your offline relationships into spaces they’re not ready for?  Or do you instead nurture relationships with prospects and customers in ways that work for them as you build trust and gently nudge them toward[…]

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RSA vs ETA Google Ads – 4 Month Test

When Google introduced Responsive Ads to all advertisers in July 2018, I saw it as an opportunity to simplify the workflow for a common optimization task performed by search marketers: ad copy testing. It has long been a best practice to run multiple variations of ad copy simultaneously, accrue data, and decide winners and losers[…]

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ppc-web-design

Change How You Think About Web Design – Part 3

After somebody clicks on an ad, the only way to turn that person from a window shopper to a customer is the experience you provide for them on your website. It’s that critical moment, right after a click, for your brand to make an impression, gain trust, and ultimately get the person to spend their[…]

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