Abe

The secret to troubleshooting paid media performance: Deeply understand how the metrics influence each other. To use a paid search example, if cost went up, it’s either because clicks went up, CPC went up, or both. Let’s say clicks went up. Either impressions went up, CTR went up, or both. Let’s say it’s mostly driven by impression growth. The reason for that could be one or a combo of the following: - Search demand grew. Take the impressions and divide it by the impression share over that time period. Compare it to the “impression universe” of your comparison period. This isn’t perfect but I’ve found it to be directionally accurate and more helpful than Google Trends. - Bid strategies got more aggressive. Check the change log/team knowledge for any bid strategy changes that would cause more aggressive bidding. - Showing for new search terms. This could be from adding new keywords, changing keyword match types, or Google interpreting a new search trend as matching to an existing keyword. - Competition left the space. Check auction insights and confirm if competitors have lower impression shares compared to previous periods. In sum, almost all performance shifts start with ID’ing a change in cost or conversions, then working backward to what the most immediate influences of these metrics are. This method has provided me a more deliberate, data-driven troubleshooting path compared to starting with a hypothesis that could make me miss something.

If you're a marketing agency, here's when you should (and should NOT) put pricing on your website: Ask any of your sales reps and they will tell you that the biggest obstacle they overcome is the B in BANT, Budget. When we launched Abe, my new LinkedIn Ads Agency for B2B, we instantly knew that we had to make the price public. Why? Because it's a single service offering. And single service agencies who have double or triple niched are doing themselves a disservice if they are not talking price on their website. Abe is $5k a month. If you spend more then $20k a month on ads, we will charge you an additional % of ad spend. Simple. By simplifying our price and packaging, we reduce waste in our sales process. No more misaligned budgets and no more qualifying by cost, now we can dive deeper into what makes Abe different and listen to the exact needs of our audience. So you might be thinking, why not do this for Directive? Well, it’s simple, we offer lots of different services at Directive and these services all have different forms of pricing + packaging that is truly unique to each account. If you have a single service that for a specific platform or vertical (double niche) you should definitely put pricing on your site.

We’re in a zero-click world. Traffic doesn’t matter. It’s all about discoverability. Everyone’s freaking out about G2 traffic dropping. An 84% drop since 2022. Capterra too. But they’re looking at it all wrong. Think about it. Today, buyers are looking to DISCOVERY engines: Reddit, ChatGPT, even Google increasingly is giving the answer instead of the click. If they mention you, you’re discovered and later you get the traffic direct. Sure, G2 is primarily a social proof factory. But it’s also a discovery engine. It’s where buyers go when they have purchase intent. And guess what? G2’s organic traffic dropping has zero impact on that. Why? Because people still visit G2 directly to research solutions. And G2 still ranks #1 for “G2.” Are you discoverable there? Does G2 rank for your category on Google? And, within your category, do you have enough G2 reviews to be discovered? G2’s overall traffic dropping doesn’t matter. What matters is whether your customers can still find you.