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Paid Media articles

Targeted paid media drives awareness, website visitors, leads, and revenue. Find out more about search advertising, social media advertising, and more by exploring our resources below. Need more? Explore Two Octobers’ paid media management services.

The Mind of the Searcher

I was recently working with a client and struggling with a profoundly low conversion rate coming from search ads. The keywords we were buying were on target, the ads were performing well, and the landing pages appeared well designed. Then I tried to put myself inside the mind of the searcher. When I did that,

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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

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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

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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

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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?

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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

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