Category: Advertising

digital advertising tools and strategies

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Episode 60: What makes a good Pay-Per-Click Marketer with Greg Finn

Do you know a marketer who is adept at using Google Ads or a similar platform to turn out a steady supply of leads? Like Liam Neeson in Taken, what these specialists “have are a very particular set of skills” Not only that, without a standard industry certification, the only way to see if someone possesses these rare skills is to divert some media budget and see what they do with real money. 

Those that do well at this sort of thing can be described as having Multipotentiality or Renaissance qualities. 

  • Part-numbercruncher
  • Part-editor
  • Part-scientist
  • part-librarian

Does such a person exist that can do all this? If there is, they may well be the Perfect PPC Professional. But even if there isn’t, it falls to some of us to hire a person to run our paid ads, or we ourselves may be that person, who’s figuring out which skills to develop. In either case, it’s important to identify the right traits needed for this role. 

Greg Finn has known how to run PPC marketing campaigns for more than a dozen years and now hires and develops people in this role. Many in digital marketing know him by the hundreds of articles in Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. He founded the agency  Cypress North  with his partner Matthew Mombrea and is one of the hosts of the long-running podcast Marketing O’Clock. 

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Episode Reboot: Don’t stop at just reading about a topic, write about it so you get a really good understanding of it.

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Episode 50: Join or Die, Digital Advertising in the age of Automation by Patrick Gilbert

This is the fifth book of our “Summer Books” series and we’re even going social with the hashtag, #SummerMarketingBooks on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. This book focuses on Pay-Per-Click marketing, and whether you do any PPC yourself or outsource, you should be aware of how much of a ground-shaking shift artificial intelligence is making here. Remember that Google & Facebook have been investing enormous sums of money on AI. Their ad empires pretty much run on AI now, and it’s vaulted them to become two of the world’s top 10 companies.

While acknowledging that this sounds ominous for advertisers, our author believes that by joining with them on campaign automation, we can actually thrive. Our author’s seen this shift happen first-hand, as part of the NY-based agency Adventure Media, where he serves as COO. his book, Join or Die: Digital Advertising in the age of Automation, came out in 2020.

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Episode 49: Ponderings of a PPC Professional by Kirk Williams

This is the fourth episode in our Summer Books series. 

Anyone who’s joined a Twitter chat or attended a conference session about it knows that discussing PPC stirs up strong opinions. The criticisms around Google, with its near-monopoly, grow louder and louder. Whether it’s making their auction more competitive, their campaigns more automated, or their data reporting more opaque, it seems that everyday there’s something Google does to tick off its users. 

It is against this backdrop that Kirk published “Ponderings of a PPC Professional” in 2020. For the last decade, Kirk’s agency, ZATO marketing, has specialized in Google Shopping Ads. His moral  compass clearly points towards what’s best for the advertisers that are his clients. Kirk is not afraid to tackle these things head-on. In some areas, the book offers a philosophical slant, keeping it fresh for whatever a PPC marketer in the future might be grappling with.

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