Here’s the first round of requirements:

• Hold current 501(c)(3) status, as determined by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service
• Acknowledge and agree to the application’s required certifications regarding nondiscrimination and donation receipt and use.
• Google for Nonprofits is open only to organizations based in the United States
• Website cannot display revenue generating ads, such as Google AdSense or affiliate advertising links

Who is not eligible for a Google Grant:

• Governmental entities and organizations
• Political or Religious organization
• Hospitals and health care organizations
• Schools, childcare centers, academic institutions, and universities ( but philanthropic arms of educational organizations are eligible)
• An organization’s 501(c)(3) whose status is not yet publicly updated in Guidestar’s online database; copies of IRS letters are not sufficient for this requirement.

Alos, Google only allows one (1) membership per organization. But umbrella organizations that share Employee Identification Numbers (EINs) with their parent organizations are eligible for individual memberships.

Is a Google Grants Account the same as a normal Adwords Account?

NO. In fact, there are some important differences that you need to be aware of.

• The maximum cost-per-click (CPC) is only $1.00
• You can only advertise on Google.com only (no partners or display network)
• Ads must link to a page on the website.
• Keywords must be relevant to the programs/services
• Strictly commercial advertising is not allowed.
• Google ads cannot link to pages that are linked to other websites.
• Ads offering financial products are not allowed.
• Google creates the account for you and funds it directly.
• Google Grants account is subject to the same algorithms and policies as a regular account

Can Google give more than $10,000/month?

Yes. But there’s a catch and a test that you need to take. Google has a program called GrantsPro which is basically for advanced users who must pass a test and fulfill some performance requirements. When eveyrthing is all said and done, organizations can apply to receive an increased AdWords account budget of $40,000 per month.

Here are the Eligibility Requirements for an organization to get more than $10,000/month:

• Google Grants account has reached $9,500 during any two months in the last 12 months
• Organizations must meet eligibility requirements in order to apply, be in good standing with the Google
• Take and pass the Grantspro test with a score of 85% or higher.
• Submit the online application (being sure to articulate why your organization requires the additional resources, and provide detailed plans for how you intend to spend the increased advertising budget.)
• Current AdWords budget must be at or above $9,500 during any two months in the 12 months prior to submitting your application.
• Have installed and be tracking at least one active conversion goal through Google Analytics
• Be in good standing with the Google Grants program.

Dear Diary...

If you manage online campaigns, you’re probably overwhelmed by the daily manual labor required to manage campaigns properly. Campaign managers often spend over one third of their time on tedious tasks such as bid management or keyword performance monitoring.

Lucky you!

Many tools are now available on the market that can help you automatically change the main parameters of your campaigns (keywords, bids, ad texts, positions or even landing pages) according to precise rules (that you set according to your goals and objectives). This frees up some of your time which will be better spent on developing improved strategy, text ads, and landing pages.

Adwords has developed their Automated Rules, and the main vendors in Campaign Management (Acquisio, Marin, etc.) propose some very interesting PPC Automation Tools. The goal of this post is not to analyse or compare these solutions (that could be the subject of another article), but to see how to make the most of them.

Automation Tools Are Powerful (but Limited)

Most of the time, the so-called “bid management tools” do much more than just “manage bids”. All these tools let you automate some of the more tedious aspects of paid search, be it for increased profitability, or just for the sake of saving time.

Power Corrupts

Indeed, automation can make or break PPC campaigns.

These automation rules can be applied to a number of aspects within your account including:

• Bidding
• Budget
• Status Updates
• Campaign, Ad Groups, Keywords level

They will also help you reach different targets and goals, such as:

• Zeroing in on an Average Position
• Maintaining a specific Cost per Click
• Optimizing Conversions
• Controlling Cost per Conversion

But these are not magical tools! 

And this is something that too many campaign managers forget: tools are just tools. Yes, they make many things possible, such as automating repetitive tasks, and working 24/7 without complaining. But there will never be a software substitute for detailed competitive analysis and keyword selection.

The same applies to writing great ad copy, even to running tests, and optimizing landing pages.

Repetitive (and boring) tasks are perfect for automation, but strategic and analytical tasks are best left for us humans. Limit the amount of blood, sweat and tears with automation tools, but always put your brain in the driver’s seat!

How to Make the Most of Your Tools & Avoid Costly Mistakes

If you’re going to leverage ad management tools to their greatest potential, the first thing you have to do is determine what you’re trying to achieve. You can’t create a great set of rules, if you do not have crystal clear priorities and goals.

Listen up...

Secondly,you have to make sure your campaigns are properly set-up. The best rules in the world won’t turn lead into gold. You also need a solid campaign to be governed by those great (automation) rules. So make sure these standard best practices are in place for your campaigns. Consider the following:

• Text Ads: Engaging, Call to Action, Relevancy, Dynamic versions, etc.
• Landing Pages: Content, Navigability, Conversion Tracking, etc.
• Keywords: Match Type Variations, Negative Keywords, etc.
• Ad Groups: Consistent, Targeted, Ad Rotation, etc.
• Choose Parameters and Actions: select the parameters you want to use or control with your rules — such as Quality Score, Avg Position, Max. CPC, ROI/ROAS, conversions, or a combination of these or other metrics.

Third, once this is all done, you have to choose (1) the scope of your rules (e.g. your whole account, one or several campaigns, adgroups, keywords, engines, etc…), (2) the date range you want to take into account, and (3) the frequency at which you want your rules to run.

Fourth, you’ll need to determine what actions you will take, when issues have been determined — such as pausing campaigns, increasing or decreasing max. CPC, be alerted, etc.

Fifth, you’ll need to test, test, test. Testing is extremely important. You should never launch an automatic rule without testing it carefully. Work it out in “simulation mode”, and do not allow your rules to make any decisions based on a few clicks, or non significant data (from a statistical point of view).

And finally, enjoy! Now you can make your own decision and try to benefit from the awesome opportunities created by campaign automation tools.

Just never forget: YOU make the rules!

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Enter 20ACQU upon registration and SAVE 20% on any conference pass. Access over 20 top trending sessions on Search, Analytics, Social Media, and Video Marketing.

You Will Also Learn:

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1. Clean Up Your Ad Groups

Credit: clogwog

When you’re feeling strapped for time, it can be tempting to toss hundreds of keywords and dozens of ads into one large ad group and let them run. After all, it seems logical that managing a few uber-ad groups would be far simpler than a dozen or more smaller, tightly coupled ad groups, right? Wrong.

Taking the time to set up several, tightly focused ad groups with highly relevant keywords, ads and landing pages will be simpler and save you time in the long run. The data you collect on these ad groups will be far more relevant and actionable. You’ll know quickly which keywords and ads are working well and which aren’t so you can more easily optimize your campaign to improve performance.

What’s more, you’ll see better campaign performance from tightly coupled ad groups. Google will award you with higher Quality Scores, which will lower your Cost Per Click (CPC), and you’ll see a better Click Through Rate (CTR) and Conversion Rate.

2. Make Bulk Changes to Your Campaigns

Making a bid price or ad copy change here and there in AdWords is relatively quick and easy. But if you’re making a large number of campaign-wide changes, you’ll be better off leveraging a campaign management tool like Google’s AdWords Editor or Acquisio’s bulk editor.

These tools allow you to make bid price changes to dozens or hundreds of keywords at once, or change ad landing page URLs in bulk rather than one by one. What’s more, they allow you to work offline, so network latency isn’t an issue as you work to make big changes to you campaign quickly.

3. Use Negative Keywords

Negative keywords let you prevent your ads from being shown for searches containing that negative keyword term. For instance, if you’re selling software and don’t have a free offering, adding “-free” to your negative keyword list will prevent your ads from being served when a searcher enters “free software” into Google.

Leveraging negative keywords can simplify campaign management by making sure only the most relevant traffic comes to your site, which will improve your CTR and conversion rates, and reduce the “noise” in your data analysis by filtering out visitors who are unlikely to buy your product or service.

4. Leverage Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) is the practice of writing ads with variables, which will then populate with a user’s exact search term when the ad is served. When a user sees an ad with their exact search term included and bolded in the ad copy, they will be more likely to click your ad. Using dynamic keyword insertion can increase your click-through rate, which also improves your Quality Score.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion - Source: Redfly Marketing

The best part about using Dynamic Keyword Insertion is that it’s simple to do, and will save you loads of time! Rather than writing a separate ad for every keyword in an ad group, DKI will give you the same effect with just one ad.

Using DKI in your ads is simple. Just type {KeyWord:} and the default keyword you want to use if the searcher’s keyword is too long to fit in the ad. Then when a user sees your ad, they’ll see the search term they just typed in your ad, making it highly relevant and attractive to them. But be careful – DKI used improperly can result in ads that don’t make sense, so it’s best to avoid using broad match keywords in your DKI ad groups.

5. Use Ad Scheduling (to turn on/off your campaign automatically)

Credit: Kapa

Ad Scheduling, or day parting, lets you specify specific times of day, or days of the week when your ads will run. This can be particularly useful if you find that your customers convert on your web site during certain times of the day/week.

For example, if you sell products to other business in the U.S., it’s unlikely that you’re going to make many sales at 3:00 a.m. on Saturdays. So, it’s more cost effective to simply turn off your ads during this time of day.

Of course, doing this manually multiple times per week would be a huge hassle, so AdWords makes it easy schedule when your ads run with Ad Scheduling. To determine the best times of day or days of the week to run your ads, look at your conversion data in Google Analytics. This will let you see when your site is generating the most conversions. But be sure to take time zones into consideration.

For example, if your AdWords account is set to the Pacific time zone and you want your ads to run during normal U.S. business hours, you’ll need to run your campaign from 5:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. to account for all time zones in the continental U.S.

These are just a few ways to simplify your PPC campaign management. If you have other ideas, please leave them in the comments section below.

Location is everything...

Wait, what does this mean?

Well, let’s say that someone is on their smartphone and standing in front of a coffee shop. If this person is using a mobile app that incorporates Location Based Advertising, it becomes possible for an advertiser to know that this person is actually standing in front of a coffee shop, and send them an relevant ad (or coupon, or whatever) instantly.  This ad can be from the coffee shop they are standing in front of, or it can even be for the competition down the street and around the corner. Perhaps this ad from the competition is so compelling it entices the consumer to travel a bit farther up the street, and reap the discount from the ad they just got.

This actually happens on a regular basis with Location Based Advertising, as this form of advertising has been shown to be quite effective. It is a powerful thing for a business to know a consumer is in close proximity to their store and offer them an incentive to make them take those final steps to enter the store.

This is exactly what Location Based Advertising does. It knows where the consumer is positioned in the real world and delivers an ad for a product/service that is “close by” the current location of the consumer.

OK, that’s great!  But how does it work?  Sounds complicated…

Yes, you are right, the technology behind Location Based Advertising is insanely complicated, but we won’t let that get in our way of learning some of the basics about Location Based Advertising!

How about a quick Q&A?

Q: How does Location Based Advertising “know” the current location of a consumer so they can send them an ad?
A: Most of today’s high end smartphones (iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Nokia) have what is known as a GPS chip.  A GPS chip is a little microchip that interprets signals from GPS satellites in space and figures out your current position based on those signals. These chips can also figure out your position by using cell tower triangulation to “jump start” the process of getting your GPS position. This “jump start” makes the process of getting your current location much faster. By using cell phone tower triangulation, it means getting a consumer’s location can now happen within seconds, and not minutes as is the case when using GPS radio signals alone.  Most of the same modern smartphones that have a GPS chip also have the ability to use cellphone triangulation. In reality, the differences between these two technologies is not something you necessarily need to worry about, but still it is some good background info to have.

Q: If I am walking down the street, how close do I have to be to a place of business before I get one of these “Location Based Ads”?
A: Traditionally you would get an Location Based Ad served to you as soon as you cross a Geofence.

Q: Geofence?  Eh, what’s that?
A: A geofence is nothing more than an predefined area on a map.  In Location Based Advertising, the place of business doing the advertising is usually in the middle of the area defined by the Geofence.  Traditionally, the defined area (Geofence) is nothing more than a simple circle drawn around the place of business. (or a square or a polygon). How far out this geofence is drawn, (a few blocks, a few miles, etc) all depends on the ad campaign and the goals of the advertiser. Once a consumer is inside the area of the geofence, they are served up a Location Based Ad.  To reiterate: Outside the Geofence, no ad, inside the geofence, you get served an ad. Simple!

Blue area denotes Geofence with coffee shop in the middle. Green marker is outside the geofence. Red marker is inside the geofence.

Q: Why should I care about this Geofence?
A: The timing of the delivery of your ad to the consumer needs to be useful and relevant based on their location.  For example, in a large city with many coffee shops and lots of pedestrians, it might be most effective to make your Geofence small, and send out the ad to consumers only within a 3 block area.  Anyone outside that 3 block area will usually not feel compelled to travel more than 3 blocks for a  coffee shop and your ad will not be as effective . Conversely, for a coffee shop in a small town on a major highway, it might be most effective to stretch that Geofence out to 3 miles and get people as they are coming into town on the highway.  Finding the “sweet spot” of the size and shape of your Geofence to make your ad campaign the most effective will be the thing that distinguishes your marketing skills from the rest of the pack.

So, there you have it, a quick overview to some of the more important concepts associated with Location Based Advertising.

Location Based Advertising is set to become the new norm in the coming years, so start your education now. You will want to position yourself and take advantage of this emerging field in the future.  And remember, “the early bird gets the worm”, and Location Based Advertising is one worm which you will want to make sure to be early enough to get!

Whether you’re creating custom geos or optimizing by state or province, there are a lot of efficiencies to be had by taking the user’s location into consideration when setting up and managing your display campaigns. Here are a few examples and tricks of the trade.

Location, Location, Location – Ad Targeting & Retargeting

Obviously for advertisers with a physical location, geography is going to be a key variable in a user’s propensity to convert. When considering the geographical areas to target, be sure you do so in the context of your display buying strategy.

When planning a media buy, I always think of geo targeting and targeted media as having an inverse relationship. The more targeted the media, the less geo-targeting is needed. The less targeted the media, the more geo-targeting is needed.

Media Targeting vs Geo-Targeting

Example: We manage a hotel campaign with locations throughout Hawaii. Retargeting is the most targeted of all display buys and we’re able to hit their ROI goals regardless of geo. In general, you should never limit the reach of your retargeting campaigns by applying geo restrictions. The travel category buys only perform in Hawaii and on the West Coast of US and Western Canada. It turns out most people on the East Coast in-market for warm weather travel chooses the Caribbean over Hawaii. We’re able to get the Run-of-Exchange (ROE) buys to perform by just targeting all of Hawaii at very low CPMs.

So the further a user is from the core market area the more targeted the media buy needs to be. The closer a user is the core market area, the greater the chances of them converting, thus we can afford to buy cheaper less targeted inventory.

This layered approach to geo-targeting allows you to cast a wide net geographically, while also testing a wide variety of placements in the immediate geographic area of the advertiser’s location. You have the best of both worlds and can apply the insights from one strategy to another.

This is an example on a macro-level, but you can also apply these concepts at the local level. When advertisers have multiple locations with smaller market areas you might need to go more granular on the geo-targeting.

For example: with a national health and fitness client we do ROE for all of the locations zip codes and a Fitness Category buy at 20 mile radius of the locations. We also bid higher for users within the 10 mile radius vs. those in the 10-20 mile radius. Also, using Dynamic creative optimization to have the specific location inserted in the creative can also help make the ad more relevant to the user.

Think Outside the Geo-Targeting Box

There's more than one way to geo-target a cat, I mean ad...

Even if an advertiser doesn’t have a physical location or a defined market area, you’ll still want to review the geo report on a regular basis. Due to a variety of factors, performance can vary greatly by geography. In those cases, be sure to optimize your bids accordingly at the State or Province level to start, and then eventually by DMA.

Depending on the advertiser there can also be hidden geographical trends, so I would encourage you to look beyond the conventional geo confines of State/DMA/City, and see if performance varies by factors like:

• Rural vs. Urban vs. Suburban
• Cold Weather Regions vs. Warm Weather Regions
• College Towns vs. Bedroom Communities
• Residential Zips vs. Commercial Zips
• Red States vs. Blue States

The bottom line is, don’t be afraid to experiment with geo-targeting. Discovering and leveraging those kinds of geo-based insights might be the X factor in making a campaign work. Always keep in mind the inverse relationship between targeted media and targeted geos. Doing both to the extreme can limit your reach, so remember to strike that balance. And when in doubt, always err on the side of casting a wider net and then letting the data in the geo report speak for itself.

Credit: Jeff the Trojan

The average player’s driver is capable of hitting the ball 60-70 yards farther today. Irons are more forgiving, no matter where impact is made on the clubface. Golf balls go farther with no loss of feel or spin.

My favorite advance is GPS. From this, you get the exact distance to the hole, and to the hazards. How has it helped us? Well, it helps some players remember which hole they’re playing after the beer cart has made one too many visits.

Some pros do very well by pushing the equipment rules to their limits. Unknown Matt Every began this year with a putter that resembled a black metal railway tie. Turns out the “Black Swan” putter has some pretty advanced engineering built in: the highest “putter momentum of inertia in putter history,” and a “sweet spot three balls wide”! Every led the Sony Open going into the final round, but fell back a bit, settling for a tie for sixth, and $178,062.50. A bit better than my $62.50 in lifetime golf earnings.

Why, with all the hardware in the bag, don’t amateurs’ average scores improve? A few reasons:

• Practice and technique mean a lot more to scoring performance than equipment.
• Commitment and passion feed into practice and technique.
• The 10,000 hours rule: You’re not going to get there playing 10 rounds a year (that would take you 200 years — and arthritis poses a real problem at this point.)
• Strategy: Top pros “think their way around the course.” Golf presents a series of puzzles with each hole. Not attempting to solve them eats away at your score, bit by bit.
• Games often get harder when everyone has access to the same improved tools. For example, to compensate for the added length of players’ drives, course were lengthened, and given more “teeth”.
• Feel: You have to swing the club, which means a connection between mind, body, ball, situation, and space. Having scientists improve “velocity and power” without adjusting other variables might make you a worse player overall.
• Forgiving clubs keep more hopeless players keep coming out. Such players don’t even learn the basics like a correct grip. The average score suffers.

Leonardo da Vinci's Flying Machine

When you hand over a miracle tool to the general population, the wide divergence in responses to them is amazing.Casual golfers always used to make the excuse that unlike the pros, they didn’t have a caddie who carried around a “yardage book” for every nook and cranny on the course. With the advent of GPS, that excuse was gone.

So what does the average player do when given the information that on a 370-yard hole, the water hazard begins 230 yards from the tee, and ends 260 yards from the tee? Pulls out his “big stick,” and tries to clear the water, or thinks/hopes “I rarely hit that far, so at worst I’ll cozy up 227 yards down the fairway”. And… whack! 252 yards, a beautiful looking shot… if only… that hazard wasn’t there. Plop! Yet all along, there was a much higher probability of scoring par by starting with a shot of roughly 205 yards, using a 205-yard club (most players will score no differently from 95 yards out and 165 yards out).

In other words, you give an amateur a powerful tool, and he doesn’t use it for any consistent, directed purpose. The player invests virtually no strategic effort in order to capitalize on new information he has at his disposal. The question to be asked there was “what should be done about the hazard”? The answer was, by default: nothing. Keep playing the way you always do.

Moore’s Law and the Cloud-Based Bubble Economy/Bubble

In every field – perhaps more so in computing than others – we’ve seen stunning increases in raw power and performance over the past fifty and even ten years. Moore’s Law (not strictly a scientific ‘law’), the feverish push for increases in computing speed  (which drove Intel to great performance over the years), has translated into outcomes and economic transformations that couldn’t have happened without them.

Yet as a society we still face many challenges. We don’t face bandwidth scarcity or content distribution costs like we did twenty years ago, yet we still live with many zero-sum games, including those involving precious commodities like water, breathable air, and yes, even food.

Before the mania for “computing in the cloud” really began to take off, but long after pioneers had already pieced together low-cost business tools to launch their unique dreams and schemes, I was struck to hear Google CEO Eric Schmidt reflecting on the remarkable business climate we live in today.

The “cost of launching a startup” was near zero, went the line. And on paper I know this to be true.

The Eric Schmidt Perspective

The cost of running some kinds of tech startups plunged – 90 to 98 percent, perhaps – between 1996 and 2006. So you can pretty much do anything you set your mind to (assuming you have a computer science degree or two, a one-bedroom apartment, and an Internet connection.) This became a popular line at Google, delivered by other popular Google keynote speakers. It was as if they and others in Silicon Valley were part of a liberating army, removing costs from the climate of opportunity, to allow the best and brightest sparks to ignite without the burden of debt or massive VC fundraising efforts.

It’s only been about fours years since those comments, but on reflection, they clearly paint a very partial picture of the reality.

An “unprecedented great climate for business” turned into a credit squeeze, a deep recession, and a recognition that much of the wider economic bubble that had been fueling so much risk-taking was sustained by unsustainable economic demand and record levels of household debt.

So that’s one thing. Rent and food will still cost you. And to earn those, you generally need a job, not a cool startup plan and free software.

And funny thing: the biggest news to come was not about all the shoestring startups somehow hitting it big, but rather, how much more investor money was starting to pile into young companies to help them at the seed rounds right through to A, B, and C rounds of venture financing and beyond. That doesn’t count all the big media companies divesting (or simply losing) old assets and putting whatever capital they have left or can raise into a variety of digital enterprises.

Web 2.0 Propaganda

Web 2.0 VC “bubble” money (after briefly drying up in the crunch) fed smoothly into the next phase: a doubling-down into a massive tech IPO bubble that rewarded the boldest and biggest players (and their investment bankers). Pandora, Groupon, LinkedIn, Zillow, Angie’s List, Zynga, TripAdvisor, (and, coming soon, Yelp and Facebook) raised huge amounts of capital in their attempts to go for broke and become “category killers” — much as Amazon had done (as it turned out, successfully) all those years ago.

Facebook, Zillow, and Twitter combined raised in the vicinity of one billion dollars prior to going public.

So much for the idea that starting a company is cheap, and that virtually anyone can do it without the aid of the financial markets. Remarkable founders, remarkable teams, remarkable investors, remarkable network effects with users, remarkable media stories, etc. created a “spiky” world of new tech giants with massive consumer followings, not a flat, fun world where everyone got to work on their pet projects.

So the availability of cheap bandwidth, remote teamwork, and useful SaaS tools – even ones that cost 90-98% less than they did a decade ago – gets a lot more people to the first tee now, but few hit it well enough to be able to quit their day job.

True pioneers and visionaries may not be so different from regular people – or so some business books now tell us. Well, they’re certainly human. And they’re not reckless, necessarily. But they’re generally massive outliers in some way. You give them the tools, and they are in a tiny minority of individuals who can ignite those sparks into a bonfire of growth. [For more on this, see the section on Bill Gates' remarkable success in Jim Collins, Great By Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck – Why Some Thrive Despite Them All (HarperBusiness, 2011, pp. 162-166).]

Limitations: Moore’s Law & Economies of Scale

Moore’s Law has certainly made a wide variety of technological innovations possible, and this has an impact not only on your lifestyle, but on all fields.

But such ‘laws’ don’t always seem to change our fortunes. Some environments aren’t even compatible with such laws.

A Fish Out of Water - Credit: Julian Burgess

Golf comes with a built-in social and physical environment that dictates a tempering of raw “power.” We may not quite have Moore’s Law in golf clubs – among other things, courses would eventually reach the size of our solar system. A “club” has to do its thing within certain limitations. Players can’t propel the ball into orbit with rocket launchers. Perhaps that’s just common sense. And then there is etiquette to think about.

Moore’s Law doesn’t, by itself, make great companies. Nor do cheaper, faster tools generally.

If barriers to entry on (for example) computing and storage were lowered to zero, it would might create a whole new set of challenges in any industry.

We can't all be cover girls...

Moore’s Law doesn’t mean you can become Tiger Woods.

Moore’s Law can’t even exist in social environments that restrict pure advances in speed, power, or output. Playing “better,” or more “favorably,” not “bigger, faster, and dirtier” is often truly the game you’re playing… something that gets lost in breathless media and coverage of the “pure advances” in things like chip technology. [For a thoughtful counterpoint to breathless technology and business media, see Umair Haque's views on value cycles, renewable resources, and the tech industry's penchant for creating 'thin value'. Umair Haque, The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business (Harvard Business Press, 2011).]

Cloud computing won’t turn all garage hackers into Mark Zuckerberg.

Plus, you wouldn’t want it to.

These are tools, plain and simple.

The tools are incredibly powerful in the right hands. And nearly useless in the wrong ones.

Making them cheaper, or free, doesn’t always spur a sudden uptake of grateful users.

Most middle-class families today can afford gym memberships, Nordic skating skis, and even personal trainers.

All families can afford running shoes.

And yet the obesity epidemic shows no signs of abating.

Why Cost is Good

Where am I headed with all this? I should be here to talk about marketing automation tools, which is mainly the subject of the Acquisio blog, right?

I’ll talk about all of that quite a bit in the coming year. But I just had to get that off my chest.

I like that so many of these tools are affordable to so many of us, that’s for sure. I once wrote an article that lauded then-new Google Analytics for “democratizing” actionable analytics, to put it within reach of the average business.

GA’s free power is a great example of today’s awesome and more level playing field for the smaller business, certainly. No one would want this game to be playable only by a cartel of companies who can afford six figures a year for Web Analytics, for example.

But some cost is good. Some cost (whether it’s in time, hustle, or cash) helps the more passionate and committed among us get a bit of an advantage over those who won’t invest.

Back to the wide world of sports: in my brief, inauspicious career in high school cross-country skiing, those of us who lived in warmish climates spent quite a bit of time in the offseason doing what was called “dryland training”: running up and down ravines in sweltering temperatures, and strapping on early “roller skis” to pole around on dead-end streets.

Credit: Daniel Malmhall

The investment in strange (and somewhat expensive) equipment paid off in performance. And wouldn’t you know, dryland training turns out to be another spectacular example of how methods that give you an edge in one era become mere “tablestakes” in another.

All professional hockey players, for example, train throughout the summer. Being “in shape” isn’t much of an advantage in pro hockey today.

Despite the fact that others will eventually catch up to your entrepreneurial use of new tools and methods, maybe that’s just it.

An “edge” is never forever. But those that seek an edge are often rewarded.

The tools will never literally be your edge, but if you find yourself leveraging their power when others are busy with something else, chances are your passion to discover powerful new tools is a symptom of your personal commitment to superior performance.

How committed can you be? To be truly great at anything, you need a level of commitment that is – to put it mildly – unbalanced. As the great David Feherty put it: “If you’re good at this game, there’s something seriously wrong with you. [...] If you have dinner with Vijay Singh and a pea rolls into his mashed potatoes, he’s got a fork in his hand, but he’s looking at a bunker shot.”

As a result, the ClickEquations blog will be merged with the Acquisio blog. This means that if you’re subscribed to the ClickEquations blog, you’ll soon start getting updates from the Acquisio blog feed.

The Acquisio blog updates several times a week with tips, insights and strategies to help marketers get the most out of their online campaigns. From PPC and display ad insights to mobile marketing and social media strategies, the Acquisio blog is full of expert advice from both the Acquisio team and a roster of guest bloggers.

So if you’re subscribed to the ClickEquations blog, we look forward to updating you with Acquisio’s great content. And if you’re not already subscribed, we hope you’ll consider adding the Acquisio blog feed to your favorite RSS reader.