Many PPC advertisers obsess over click-through rates, using them as a quick measure of ad performance. But CTR alone doesn’t tell the whole story – what matters most is what happens after the click. That’s where many campaigns go wrong. The problem with chasing high CTRs Most advertisers think the ad with the highest CTR […]

The web’s purpose is shifting. Once a link graph – a network of pages for users and crawlers to navigate – it’s rapidly becoming a queryable knowledge graph.  For technical SEOs, that means the goal has evolved from optimizing for clicks to optimizing for visibility and even direct machine interaction. Enter NLWeb – Microsoft’s open-source […]

Nearly 90% of businesses are worried about losing organic visibility as AI transforms how people find information, according to a new survey by Ann Smarty. Why we care. The shift from search results to AI-generated answers seems to be happening faster than many expected, threatening the foundation of how companies are found online and drive […]

Q4 is here – and for ecommerce brands, that means the biggest sales opportunities of the year are just ahead. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas – the biggest sales events are just around the corner. To hit your targets, preparation is key. It’s not too late to act, and the opportunities ahead are huge. Use […]

The death of an ad, like the end of the world, doesn’t happen with a bang but with a whimper.  If you’re paying attention, you’ll notice the warning signs: click-through rate (CTR) slips, engagement falls, and cost-per-click (CPC) creeps up.  If you’re not, one day your former top performer is suddenly costing you money. Creative […]

Google Search Console’s performance report is stuck and has not shown an update in the main report since Sunday, October 19th. Google confirmed the issue and said it will catch up. What it looks like. As I said on the Search Engine Roundtable, before Google confirmed the issue, the performance reports for all Search Console […]

On episode 329 of PPC Live The Podcast I speak to Jack Hepp, founder of industrious Marketing LLC, discussing the fallout and what it took to bring him back to feet after he got fired from his first PPC job. The big f-up: fired from his first agency job Jack’s defining career moment came just […]

Following OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT Atlas, software company Search Atlas flagged a major issue: the AI-powered browser can interact with websites in a way that looks indistinguishable from real human users, including clicking on paid advertisements. Why we care. Businesses running digital ad campaigns could unknowingly pay for clicks generated by AI agents, not real […]

Google today celebrated the 25th anniversary of its ad platform, first launched as AdWords in 2000. Now known as Google Ads, the platform remains the backbone of the company’s revenue engine. Over two and a half decades, Google Ads has evolved from a manually managed system to a sophisticated AI-driven advertising platform spanning Search, YouTube, […]

In the early days of SEO, ranking algorithms were easy to game with simple tactics that became known as “black hat” SEO – white text on a white background, hidden links, keyword stuffing, and paid link farms.  Early algorithms weren’t sophisticated enough to detect these schemes, and sites that used them often ranked higher.  Today, […]