David Rodnitzky will be speaking on “PPC” at SearchFest 2015 which will take place Friday, February 27, 2015 in Portland Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click here.
1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.
I’m from Iowa, went to college with the great Todd Mintz, then went to law school. I realized in law school that I didn’t want to be a lawyer, so I never took the bar and moved to SF seeking fame and fortune. I ended up working at a bunch of start-ups and learning SEM on someone else’s dime for about seven years before I decided to take a crack at starting my own agency. In 2008, I founded PPC Associates out of a coffee shop in Pacifica, CA. Today, we are called 3Q Digital and offer SEM, SEO, paid social, and display advertising to about 100 clients around the globe!
2) In what circumstances would you recommend a third party bid management solution such as Marin?
Third party bid management can be useful in a few instances. First, if you have offline revenue that cannot be captured by a pixel, 3rd party tools will enable you to merge this offline data with cost. In other words, they act as a sort of data warehouse. Second, if you are running campaigns on several search engines, 3rd party tools offer workflow efficiency – you can manage everything in one place. Third, the bidding algorithms can be useful for accounts with thousands of keywords with low click volume on each individual keyword. Algorithms can cluster sparse data together to make smart decisions that a human might not be able to make. Ultimately, in the future, I think campaign management tools will act more like data and analytics platforms than bid management. I expect to see tools in the future that fuse BI, a DMP, attribution, analytics, media mix modeling, and media buying – get ready!
3) What opportunities exist in Non-Google Display and what types of clients should consider them?
Does Facebook count as non-Google display? If so, I think this is the biggest non-Google opportunity out there. But if you are labeling that as social and not display, the biggest opportunity is probably in programmatic display, i.e., the ad exchanges like Doubleclick Ad Exchange. The key here, however, is to integrate your first party data with your display campaigns. In other words, get a data management platform (DMP) and make bidding decisions based on actual customer behavior instead of inferred demographics and psychographics. This is easier said than done, though, so this is not something for the faint of heart!
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.