Welcome to Cultivative’s weekly roundup for all things PPC from around the web—everything you need to know right now about PPC!
At Cultivative, we’re all about making your life easier. We’ve gathered the top PPC news and innovations from around the web and getting it into your hands. Check out what we found this past week.
How to Optimize Facebook Ad Creative for Better Results
By Allie Bloyd | Dec 28, 2020

“To get people to stop scrolling and look at your Facebook ads, use a nice mix of standard images, videos, and graphics to see which visuals your audience responds to,” writes Allie Bloyd. To help you optimize your Facebook ad creative and copy to deliver better results, Bloyd offers these tips:
- Identify the Purpose of Your Facebook Ad Campaign
- Tips to Optimize Facebook Video Ads
- Tips to Optimize Facebook Image Ads
- 5 Tools to Design Facebook Ad Creative
Search engine saturation: The ever evolving SERP and how brands are responding
By Jason Tabeling | Dec 28, 2020

Marketing this past year has seen massive changes, with search engine saturation for brands that appear in both paid and organic listings hitting the lowest level in 11 years. Jason Tabeling attributes the situation to two key factors: The rise of DTC brands and Google Shopping moving from paid to free. To best optimize your search engine strategy, Tabeling recommends:
- Understand the customer experience
- Understand your KPIs
- Always be testing
How To Calculate Effective Click-Thru Rate
By Marc Enokou | Dec 29, 2020

When a user on Google searches for something when they come across your ad, they can also come across the organic listing. Therefore, the click through rate (CTR) does not give the full picture of what is happening. Marc Enokou argues that you need to calculate an ‘effective CTR’ that takes both the paid and organic search results (SEO) into account when calculating CTR. He defines the new metric as Effective CTR = (Organic clicks + Paid Clicks)/(Keyword Search Volume). He provides a practical example to illustrate how this is a more focused and accurate picture of how CTR is performing.
Paid Media Marketing: 8 Changes to Make in 2021
By John Lincoln | Dec 29, 2020

Paid media needs to lift your brand and heading into the new year you need to have new strategies to try out. John Lincoln offers these recommendations to try in 2021 for your paid media strategies:
1. Getting Passing Ads to Convert
2. Making Core Influencers Part of Your Business Model
3. Better Audience Management on Each Platform
4. Way More Funnels
5. More Forecasting by Source & Time With Budget Allocation
6. Getting Into Bed More With Microsoft
7. Getting an Acceptable CPA on YouTube & DSP Networks
8. Using Machine Learning to Your Advantage
How to Gauge the Quality of Your Customers (and Save on Customer Acquisition Cost)
By Tara Johnson | Dec 29, 2020

Driving revenue for your business depends on the type of customers you bring in, and not all customers are created equal. Tara Johnson explains that “the majority of your revenue is driven by only about 10% of your customers. Those customers are your most valuable — and if one of them churns, your business will take a huge hit.” To determine your high-value customers, you need to be able to calculate customer lifetime value (LTV). You also need to be to save on customer acquisition cost (CAC) by focusing on higher-value customers instead of investing in customers who won’t bring in enough value.
5 Retail Insights from a Covid Christmas
By Armando Roggio | Dec 30, 2020

Armando Roggio provides insights from this year’s Holiday retail spending. Holiday spending shows trends for e-commerce’s continued growth, consumer spending, and customer relationships. Five insights from the 2020 Christmas season include:
1. E-commerce Is Booming
2. Money Will Be Spent
3. Keeping Customers Is Vital
4. Not Everyone Can Win
5. Local Suppliers
Facebook Brand Safety Tools: How to Control Where Your Ads Appear
By Tara Zirker | Dec 30, 2020

Tara Zirker reviews how to access and use Facebook’s Brand Safety tools to control where your Facebook ads appear. She also covers how to view a list of Facebook pages and Audience Network apps on which your ads could be shown and how to create a block list to manage that exposure. Additionally, she shows you how to download a delivery report to see where your Facebook ads have appeared.
We hope you learned something new you can apply to your PPC business strategy. Let us know in the comments below what you want to start implementing. As always, we are happy to be a resource for your paid advertising needs. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.