This is the second in a three-article series on business basics and digital advertising. In this article, we will apply principles learned from our sales experience before and after launching our agency more than 15 years ago. We will include examples to explain the points raised. Just because a discount can be done does not...Read More

This post is about a geeky — but important and often overlooked — tactical aspect of PPC management. Rarely do advertisers have unlimited ad budgets, even if they get a very high return on their ad spend, or great cash flow. Rather, most businesses have a fixed, planned maximum budget. And even if their business...Read More

Sometimes to make a point, it helps to use examples from other industries. Today, to help explain PPC ads, I’ll borrow an example from a legal description of real property. Have you ever tried to read a township, range, and section legal description for real property? Or find one on a map? At first glance, these...Read More

In a blog in April of this year, I wrote about automated search marketing platforms and questions to ask providers. In today’s post, I’m going to briefly compare/contrast two types of automated platforms: bid management platforms and what we’ll call budget based platforms. We’re going to stick to how they work, what they do (and...Read More

Recently we rebuilt and launched a PPC account for an Austin client that had over 3,000 negative keywords. In our 5+ years of search marketing, this was a record at TopSide. The research and collaboration with our client on negative keywords was very productive, and took about as many days as all the other components...Read More

As it says on the home page of our website, web marketing is a complex topic. Every day, your market gets more fractured, and there are more options to consider on what to do about it. It seems that everything to do with the Internet expands except the number of hours in your day to...Read More

Marketing on the web, in some ways, is still like the Wild West. It has frontiers and exciting opportunities for profit, labor saving tools, and reliable experts. We also see well-intended but inept operators and a growing number of scammers and business perils. There are enough moving parts to overwhelm anyone who is not actively...Read More

As we wrote in our May 2008 blog post, there are some very good reasons and best practices for having your company name as keywords to trigger search engine PPC ads. However, there are also some potential “gotchas” that online advertisers and buyer of leads should be aware of. Essentially, you want to make sure...Read More

In explaining website marketing and advertising, we often refer to the search engine results page as being like a split-screen television. The natural , organic results appear in the left/center of the page, and the ad results (called “Sponsored Links” in Google AdWords) display on top center and down the right side column. While both...Read More

Many business owners are surprised to learn that a website can look good, contain many pages of original content, and still not be found by the search engines. Or even when it gets traffic, the same site may not be effective at converting visitors from natural or pay per click traffic to customers. Depending on...Read More