Andy Taylor is Director of Research at Merkle, responsible for analyzing trends across the digital marketing spectrum for best practices and industry commentary. A primary contributor to the Merkle Blog, Dossier, and quarterly Digital Marketing Report, he speaks frequently at industry conferences including SMX and Digital Summit events. Prior to digital marketing, Andy worked as an event organizer for a political campaign and dabbled in freelance writing. A graduate of the University of Virginia with a degree in Economics, he likes to spend his free time watching documentaries and selling homemade ice cream sandwiches at farmer's markets with his wife.
Andy's Articles, Blog Posts, Webinars and More
Prime Day Drives Amazon Product Ads Conversion Rate Down, Impressions on Google Up
Advertisers saw big movement in Amazon Product Ads traffic and conversion rate surrounding Amazon’s Prime Day. It also appears Prime Day shoppers spilled over to search engines in order to verify that the discounts they were getting really were good deals.
Google’s Buy Button and Expandable Shopping Ads May Push Mobile PLA Performance in Line with Desktop
Google Product Listing Ad performance relative to text ads is currently different on mobile than on desktop. The new Purchases on Google and Expandable Shopping Ads features may help to close the gap.
Video: How has Mobile Impacted Paid Search?
Senior Research Analyst Andy Taylor sits down with Gemma Birch of Webcertain TV at SMX Advanced to talk about mobile paid search, touching on subjects ranging from geographic trends to cross-device estimates to the implications of the just-announced Google buy button.
Merkle|RKG Digital Marketing Report: Q2 2015 Released
Today we are pleased to announce the release of Merkle|RKG’s Q2 2015 Digital Marketing Report for download. The report offers data and analyses to highlight trends across paid search, search engine optimization, display ads, comparison shopping engines, and other areas of digital marketing.
Topics:
Display
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Paid Search
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SEO
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Social
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Mobile
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Feeds and Comparison Shopping
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Product Listing Ads
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Mobile
Google Dynamic Search Ad Headlines So Long They Look Like Organic Links
Google gives themselves a little wiggle room in creating longer headlines for DSAs. But what our analysts and others have noticed is that ‘slightly longer’ actually means ‘wayyyyyy longer.’
Topics:
Digital Marketing Channels
Five Themes from the AdWords Livestream
While none of the individual announcements were earth-shattering or will impact all advertisers dramatically in the way that Enhanced Campaigns did, there were several announcements that may be big for some specific segments, and the bigger takeaway from these largely incremental changes may be what they said
It Still Pays to Have Multiple Match Types for the Same AdWords Keyword
While CVM has certainly not been good for the value of phrase and exact match keywords, the notion that Google has so diluted the meaning of the individual match types that they no longer matter is, in short, just not true.
Topics:
Paid Search
Merkle|RKG Digital Marketing Report: Q1 2015 Released
We are excited today to announce the release of Merkle|RKG’ s Q1 2015 Digital Marketing Report.
Topics:
About Us
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Display
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Paid Search
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SEO
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Social
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Mobile
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Feeds and Comparison Shopping
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Product Listing Ads
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Mobile
When the Best Paid Search Landing Page Isn’t the Obvious One
At Merkle|RKG, we’ve always advocated for using paid search landing pages that match the specificity of users’ queries. However, as is the case with most rules, there are exceptions.
Topics:
Paid Search
Google Close Variant Exact Match Conversion Rate 52% Lower than True Exact Match
Across a sample of RKG clients, we see that close variant exact match search terms see a conversion rate of just 48% that of true exact match search terms, while close variant phrase match conversion rate was 86% that of true phrase match.
Topics:
Paid Search
Video: Tap into Smartphone Geo Data
Dissecting phone data by geography reveals some interesting trends that advertisers may be able to take advantage of in order to drive even more value from this growing traffic source. Here’s a look at some of our findings surrounding phone performance by state.
Merkle | RKG's 2nd Annual Digital Bowl Report Released
We are excited to announce the release of Merkle|RKG's 2nd Annual Digital Bowl Report.
Merkle | RKG Digital Marketing Report: Q4 2014 Released
We’re pleased to announce today’s release of Merkle | RKG’s Q4 2014 Digital Marketing Report for download.
Topics:
About Us
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Display
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Paid Search
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SEO
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Social
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Mobile
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Feeds and Comparison Shopping
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Product Listing Ads
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Mobile
