Expertise notes
Performance Marketing Notes
Ad accounts rarely fail because of bidding. They fail on audience, creative and the landing page, in that order.
The pattern
What usually goes wrong here
The account gets blamed for a problem it did not create. The audience is wrong, the creative says nothing specific, the landing page asks for too much, and then the budget gets spread evenly across everything instead of concentrated on the two things that convert. Bid strategy is the last place I look, and it is almost never the answer.
What I look at
The things that actually move it
- Tracking accuracy before anything else — if the conversion data is wrong, every decision after it is wrong
- Audience definition specific enough to write an ad to one person
- Campaign architecture that keeps search, Performance Max, Meta and remarketing from cannibalising each other
- Creative testing with a structure, so a losing ad teaches you something
- Landing pages that keep the promise the ad made
- Cost per qualified lead as the number, not cost per click
- The search terms report, read weekly, which almost nobody does
FAQ
Performance Marketing — questions I get asked
Why is a Google Ads account spending money without converting?
In most accounts I have opened it is one of six settings: broad match with no negatives, Search Partners and Display expansion left on, location targeting set to presence-or-interest, automated bidding running on a conversion that is not real, one ad group covering five intents, or a landing page that does not match the ad. Check the settings before rebuilding the strategy.
How much ad budget is enough to learn anything?
Below roughly Rs 1,00,000 a month in media spend there is usually not enough conversion data to optimise properly, so decisions get made on noise. At that level, a smaller, tightly targeted account with one clear offer beats a spread-out one.
Should you pay someone a percentage of ad spend?
It is common and it is a structural conflict of interest, because it rewards whoever manages the account for spending more of your money. Flat fees scoped to the work are cleaner. That holds whether you are hiring an agency or an individual.
From the blog
Writing on this
Why isn't my law firm's marketing producing cases?
Accidents happen at the weekend. So do the clicks you paid three hundred dollars for, and in most firms they land in a form nobody opens until Monday.
Read it →How do I actually claim manufacturer co-op advertising funds?
Reported figures put up to $35 billion of co-op and MDF unclaimed in the US each year. Nobody has to intend that for the incentive to point one way.
Read it →How do I do keyword research without paid tools?
Search volume has stopped predicting clicks. The free sources still work, but the first filter now is whether anybody clicks anything on that results page.
Read it →Related
Other notes
SEO
Most sites do not have an SEO problem. They have three at once, and fixing one without the other two is why the work appears to stall.
Read the notes →AISEO
AISEO is not a separate discipline from SEO. It is SEO done with more discipline about structure and more honesty about substance.
Read the notes →Social Media Marketing
Posting consistently and getting nothing back is a content mix problem, not a frequency problem.
Read the notes →Say hello
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