blog

Author: Nico Brooks

5 Google Ads Default Settings That Suck

Most of my friends know I’ve been involved in search marketing for a long time, so I’m often asked to look over Google Ads campaigns to see why they aren’t performing well. People even pay me to do this. The very first thing I do when I look over an account is to check for

➔ Read more

Marketing Tools and the Bread Machine Problem

I’ve spent much of the last 10 years building tools that automate online marketing tasks. Early on, I had a grand vision of creating an application that would perfectly distribute marketing investment based on an advertiser’s ROI goals. But along the way, I met a few, very smart people who changed my thinking. Before I get

➔ Read more

Turning Web Design Upside-down

Think of a website like a storefront. No one loves analogies more than I do. I’ve even used analogies to explain analogies. But sometimes they can be dangerous. If an analogy provides a mental model that mostly fits, it can blind a person to important truths. A website is like a storefront, and it is

➔ Read more

How Reviews Flow Around the Web

Click on the image for a big version, suitable for framing. My colleague Kris wrote a fine post a couple of weeks ago on the importance of online reviews for local business, and how to get them. Following that post, we did a little research to figure out how reviews get passed around between major

➔ Read more

What Percentage of Search Is Local?

I’ve had a hard time finding a good answer to this question: what percentage of searches on web search engines such as Google and Bing are local? I’ve heard wildly different statistics, possibly due to the fact that “local” is a difficult concept to define. Is a search for an area code a local search?

➔ Read more

Be Warned: Google Broad Match Keeps Getting Broad-Matchier

Google Ads “Related-To” Links and the Importance of Negative Keywords We have come across a number of instances recently where Google is broad matching terms that are barely related to the keywords we are buying. In some cases, the commercial intent of the broad match term is a complete miss with what our intent is

➔ Read more