Advertisers have long debated the merits of broad match versus phrase match in Google Ads. But while arguments around query control and relevancy remain valid, a less discussed but more decisive factor has quietly shifted the landscape: cost. Recent data shows phrase match is becoming significantly more expensive, often without delivering better results. Google’s long […]
Rand Fishkin recently sparked debate with his SparkToro blog post, “In a Zero-Click World, Traffic is a Terrible Goal.” He pointed to a HubSpot survey where 60% of marketers said their top website priority is “increasing traffic,” and 59% listed “overall traffic growth” as their primary key performance indicator (KPI). Then, Fishkin delivered the digital […]
Google will officially sunset its Ads API v18 on Aug. 20. Any applications still using this version after that date will see all API requests fail. Why we care. For developers and advertisers who rely on the API to manage and automate Google Ads campaigns, a missed upgrade means broken integrations, disrupted reporting, and paused […]
Return on ad spend (ROAS) is a common metric or key performance indicator for paid search campaigns. PPC managers and digital marketing executives have been using it for a long time. In fact, it isn’t even novel to just digital marketing. While calculating and connecting the dots with attribution for full end-to-end digital marketing is […]
Brand bidding is the practice when your affiliates or competitors run paid ads on your branded keywords to capture your traffic and potential customers. You can ignore brand bidding, but your budget and customers won’t. Recent statistics show that: CPC for branded keywords can increase up to ×10 due to aggressive brand bidding. When a […]
Google’s martin Splitt and John Mueller discussed how long it takes for SEO to have an effect. Google’s John Mueller explained that there are different levels of optimization and that some have a more immediate effect than other more complex changes. Visible Changes From SEO Some SEOs like to make blanket statements that SEO is […]
The invisible cost of not knowing where you stand You’re hitting your KPIs. Your ROAS looks solid. CPCs are under control. Everything in your Google Ads dashboard says performance is… fine. But here’s the problem: You don’t actually know how you’re performing. Not really. Why? Because Google Ads tells you what you’re doing, but not […]
OpenAI has quietly added Shopify as a third-party search partner to help power their shopping search, which shows shopping-rich results. The addition of Shopify was not formally announced, but quietly tucked into OpenAI ChatGPT search documentation. Shopify Is An OpenAI Search Partner Aleyda Solís (LinkedIn profile) recently noticed that OpenAI had updated their Search documentation […]
Marketing used to be a game of visibility. You researched the market, spotted the gaps, built the content, ran the ads. You showed up, people saw you, some of them clicked-and, crucially, you could see it happening. You had dashboards. Attribution models. Funnels. You could test, optimize, improve. It wasn’t perfect, but it was observable. That era […]
As AI-driven platforms increasingly shape how brands are represented online, marketing leaders face a new imperative: ensuring their narrative remains accurate, consistent, and strategic. In this webinar, technical marketing expert Myriam Jessier and Gerald Murphy, Evangelist at Semrush Enterprise, will introduce the Brand Control Quadrant—a practical framework for understanding and managing how large language models […]