Lovely to be featured in one of the latest posts from Think with Google, getting a chance to address some of the biggest questions we're hearing from clients as we crack on with 2023 💡 Creds also to Lara Ponniah Venya Wijegoonewardene Tom White for all the feedback throughout the many iterations of this piece! 🙌 lnkd.in/eTKp6mdf

We smashed it! (Well, I personally didn't smash it. But the Brainlabs team who put in all of the work behind this very much did!) Yesterday, we took home the Creative Coverage award at Google's Partner Summit, which celebrates the best-of-the-best in the industry. 🏆 It's a testament not only to an amazing case study submission in collaboration with The Estée Lauder Companies Inc., but also to some quite frankly very dogged, consistent work that the team has been carrying out for the past 18 months, in which we've tested Google's Demand Gen to its limits to understand how we can best put it to work for our clients. There were over 1,000 submissions this year, across 9 categories - so to come out as one of the winners feels pretty special! A massive congratulations to all of the other winners and finalists. 👏 Nathan Ridout Matthew Brett Alex Glover

Whilst it's despicable behaviour for me to already be talking about Black Friday 2025, I'm going to do it anyway because Holly Chetwood has compiled an excellent analysis on how consumer demand panned out for Brainlabs' clients during the 2024 retail peak, along with all of the juicy learnings we can take into 2025. Feel free to borrow the data for any of those final PCAs you're writing, and then shove the report in a drawer until you're ready to go again to start preparing for peak 2025!

Does Paid Search Strategy Exist? And if so, what is It? This feels like the sort of question that should be easy enough to answer for a PPC professional. But it's a topic I've been mulling over for the last few months, and I'm not convinced the answer is necessarily all that obvious. In fact, I've gotten myself so wound up over it, that I've now put myself on a timer to reach a halfway acceptable answer, by signing up to give a talk on this very topic in a month's time at HeroConf 2025. To give me a leg up, I'd love to get a pulse check from the industry. So, if you've got any kind of a point of view on what "paid search strategy" means to you, then I'd love to hear it - please chuck it in the Google Form below! It's just 1 question, and hopefully no more than 2 minutes of your time. 🙏 Google Form: lnkd.in/esuvJkDs HeroConf tickets: lnkd.in/e9NBe2cu

Loved this recent piece on Think with Google, talking about some of the latest work between Brainlabs & The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. Nothing unnecessarily flashy or over-the-top; just a robust, well-rounded combination of: - Listening to what consumers are actually asking for; - Some nifty usage of Google Merchant Centre, and; - Results with that satisfying air of inevitability about them. What more could you want from a campaign? Thank you Karolina Orgal and Jamie Girling for the write-up! lnkd.in/eQpHgHxf

If you’ve worked anywhere near paid search for the last few years, then you’ll have heard lots said about the movement towards simpler account structures & “Modern Search”. But why is it important, and why does it *actually* work? It turns out it all comes down to solving optimisation problems, and Holly Chetwood has broken it down brilliantly in Brainlabs’ latest blog. 🤓 If you like metaphors, technology, and N-dimensional solution-space diagrams, then this one is for you. 👇

GML 2025: the year of the Google Ads power user? For anyone who missed both the event & the livestream (where were you?) we’ve spun up a full write-up of the headline announcements. But buried within there, I wanted to give some extra airtime to some of my personal faves. There’s no doubt these releases are going to expand the search practitioner’s toolkit - and my take is that they will disproportionately play into the hands of the folks who have the best grasp of “how this all actually works”. *Smart Bidding Exploration.* Other than in Google’s backend, search bidding hasn’t substantially changed for years and years - so if nothing else, this development is at the very least a refreshing one. On the face of it, you could argue that Smart Bidding Exploration doesn’t jump out of the new-release line-up in quite the same way as some of the other announcements may do; but that’s precisely why it’s caught my attention. The fact that Google chose to hero it in the first place, surely suggests confidence in their early-stage testing results? Definitely one to watch. *Incrementality Testing.* Understanding incrementality is certainly up there as one of the most important objectives for media buyers, but that doesn’t make it an easy objective to achieve: for the longest time, insufficient budgets, complex data set-ups & location-matching troubles have plagued clients when it comes to properly baking incrementality into their testing roadmap. Anything that knocks down those hurdles gets the thumbs up from me. *Channel-Level Reporting in PMax.* Need I say any more? The black box is starting to open. Technically this isn’t new news, as Google announced this one on their blog at the end of last month - but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a biggy. Coming to an account near you soon. *Attributed brand searches for YouTube.* This is slightly narrower in scope than the other 3, but is a neat idea all the same - in essence, you'll be able to measure “user conducted a brand search” as if it were a conversion action for your YouTube campaigns. Important to note that this isn’t quite as powerful an insight as you’d be able to get from a brand-lift study - but the attributed data will be far more readily accessible, and I can certainly see it playing a role in assisting marketers make the case internally for “why invest in brand”. Lovely stuff. Now, time for a Guinness, I reckon. 🇮🇪

At this year's HeroConf, I gave what seemed to be a fairly well-received talk on the topic of: "Does Paid Search Strategy exist? And if so, what is It?" Sadly, the room reached capacity pretty quickly - and so droves and droves of people (at least ten, I'm told) were turned away at the door, unable to make it in for the presentation. Their pleas to the doormen fell on unaccommodating ears. Thankfully though, the kind folks at PPC Hero have captured the essence of the presentation in written form, which you can now peruse at your leisure. No stern-faced bouncers to navigate this time. lnkd.in/dSdDcssc

Lovely to be featured in one of the latest posts from Think with Google, getting a chance to address some of the biggest questions we're hearing from clients as we crack on with 2023 💡 Creds also to Lara Ponniah Venya Wijegoonewardene Tom White for all the feedback throughout the many iterations of this piece! 🙌 lnkd.in/eTKp6mdf

We smashed it! (Well, I personally didn't smash it. But the Brainlabs team who put in all of the work behind this very much did!) Yesterday, we took home the Creative Coverage award at Google's Partner Summit, which celebrates the best-of-the-best in the industry. 🏆 It's a testament not only to an amazing case study submission in collaboration with The Estée Lauder Companies Inc., but also to some quite frankly very dogged, consistent work that the team has been carrying out for the past 18 months, in which we've tested Google's Demand Gen to its limits to understand how we can best put it to work for our clients. There were over 1,000 submissions this year, across 9 categories - so to come out as one of the winners feels pretty special! A massive congratulations to all of the other winners and finalists. 👏 Nathan Ridout Matthew Brett Alex Glover

Whilst it's despicable behaviour for me to already be talking about Black Friday 2025, I'm going to do it anyway because Holly Chetwood has compiled an excellent analysis on how consumer demand panned out for Brainlabs' clients during the 2024 retail peak, along with all of the juicy learnings we can take into 2025. Feel free to borrow the data for any of those final PCAs you're writing, and then shove the report in a drawer until you're ready to go again to start preparing for peak 2025!

Does Paid Search Strategy Exist? And if so, what is It? This feels like the sort of question that should be easy enough to answer for a PPC professional. But it's a topic I've been mulling over for the last few months, and I'm not convinced the answer is necessarily all that obvious. In fact, I've gotten myself so wound up over it, that I've now put myself on a timer to reach a halfway acceptable answer, by signing up to give a talk on this very topic in a month's time at HeroConf 2025. To give me a leg up, I'd love to get a pulse check from the industry. So, if you've got any kind of a point of view on what "paid search strategy" means to you, then I'd love to hear it - please chuck it in the Google Form below! It's just 1 question, and hopefully no more than 2 minutes of your time. 🙏 Google Form: lnkd.in/esuvJkDs HeroConf tickets: lnkd.in/e9NBe2cu

Loved this recent piece on Think with Google, talking about some of the latest work between Brainlabs & The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. Nothing unnecessarily flashy or over-the-top; just a robust, well-rounded combination of: - Listening to what consumers are actually asking for; - Some nifty usage of Google Merchant Centre, and; - Results with that satisfying air of inevitability about them. What more could you want from a campaign? Thank you Karolina Orgal and Jamie Girling for the write-up! lnkd.in/eQpHgHxf

If you’ve worked anywhere near paid search for the last few years, then you’ll have heard lots said about the movement towards simpler account structures & “Modern Search”. But why is it important, and why does it *actually* work? It turns out it all comes down to solving optimisation problems, and Holly Chetwood has broken it down brilliantly in Brainlabs’ latest blog. 🤓 If you like metaphors, technology, and N-dimensional solution-space diagrams, then this one is for you. 👇

GML 2025: the year of the Google Ads power user? For anyone who missed both the event & the livestream (where were you?) we’ve spun up a full write-up of the headline announcements. But buried within there, I wanted to give some extra airtime to some of my personal faves. There’s no doubt these releases are going to expand the search practitioner’s toolkit - and my take is that they will disproportionately play into the hands of the folks who have the best grasp of “how this all actually works”. *Smart Bidding Exploration.* Other than in Google’s backend, search bidding hasn’t substantially changed for years and years - so if nothing else, this development is at the very least a refreshing one. On the face of it, you could argue that Smart Bidding Exploration doesn’t jump out of the new-release line-up in quite the same way as some of the other announcements may do; but that’s precisely why it’s caught my attention. The fact that Google chose to hero it in the first place, surely suggests confidence in their early-stage testing results? Definitely one to watch. *Incrementality Testing.* Understanding incrementality is certainly up there as one of the most important objectives for media buyers, but that doesn’t make it an easy objective to achieve: for the longest time, insufficient budgets, complex data set-ups & location-matching troubles have plagued clients when it comes to properly baking incrementality into their testing roadmap. Anything that knocks down those hurdles gets the thumbs up from me. *Channel-Level Reporting in PMax.* Need I say any more? The black box is starting to open. Technically this isn’t new news, as Google announced this one on their blog at the end of last month - but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a biggy. Coming to an account near you soon. *Attributed brand searches for YouTube.* This is slightly narrower in scope than the other 3, but is a neat idea all the same - in essence, you'll be able to measure “user conducted a brand search” as if it were a conversion action for your YouTube campaigns. Important to note that this isn’t quite as powerful an insight as you’d be able to get from a brand-lift study - but the attributed data will be far more readily accessible, and I can certainly see it playing a role in assisting marketers make the case internally for “why invest in brand”. Lovely stuff. Now, time for a Guinness, I reckon. 🇮🇪

At this year's HeroConf, I gave what seemed to be a fairly well-received talk on the topic of: "Does Paid Search Strategy exist? And if so, what is It?" Sadly, the room reached capacity pretty quickly - and so droves and droves of people (at least ten, I'm told) were turned away at the door, unable to make it in for the presentation. Their pleas to the doormen fell on unaccommodating ears. Thankfully though, the kind folks at PPC Hero have captured the essence of the presentation in written form, which you can now peruse at your leisure. No stern-faced bouncers to navigate this time. lnkd.in/dSdDcssc