Most of you don’t want to admit this, but if you really look at your process, you’re guessing what seasonal bid adjustments (SBAs) to run during Black Week. You set them based on gut feel or a vague memory of what you think worked last year. You have no real idea if you underspent or […]

Here’s the case for not doing profit-based bidding in Google Ads, despite what everyone says. I see agencies, in-house teams, and freelancers all making the same mistake: they recommend it to everyone, without exception. On paper, profit-based bidding sounds like a no-brainer. You simply import your actual profit from a transaction—revenue minus COGS, taxes, shipping,

What if I told you that most DTC brands are paying 10 times more than they need to for branded search clicks? Clicks you were probably going to get anyway. It sounds like an exaggeration, but I see it constantly. Before I break down the why, let me show you what I mean. Here’s a

Most of the chatter around Google Ads bidding focuses on Target CPA vs. Maximize Conversions. But for e-commerce, that’s the wrong conversation. The real debate, the one that’s almost never had, is Target ROAS vs. Maximize Conversion Value. On one hand, you have Maximize Conversion Value. You give Smart Bidding a budget, and it tries

Margin-based campaigns are still being recommended by people in the Google Ads space, and it constantly surprises me. It’s a broken strategy. The entire foundation for that campaign structure is full of holes, yet agencies and freelancers continue to build accounts on top of it. I’m here to tell you why they don’t work and

When a Google product manager showed me Smart Bidding Exploration in Mountain View, she called it the biggest smart bidding update ever. And honestly, I think she might be right. I was invited by Ginny Marvin as part of a small group of PPC practitioners to sit down with product managers and discuss new features,

I’m going to say something controversial: Smart Bidding has made negative keywords mostly irrelevant. For the last couple of years, some of our biggest performance gains haven’t come from adding negative keywords, but from removing them. Yep, I said removing. The reason is simple. Most advertisers are stuck in a 2018 mindset, over-using a tool

Let’s be clear: Smart Bidding is one of the best things to come out of Google Ads in years, second only to Shopping ads. It does a much better job at managing bids at scale than any human ever could. But it has blind spots. There are things Smart Bidding simply doesn’t know, and if