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.

Help influence and understand how your products appear on Google

By Limor David | Jan 7, 2019

Google Ads has announced that they want to enhance both the user and advertiser experience. They are introducing new ways to show high-quality and inspirational content to shoppers and providing robust analytics to help you better understand how customers are interacting with your brands and products across all of Google. With the new features, advertisers will be able to:

• Populate your product pages on the Google Shopping property with inspirational and high-quality content.
• Highlight the product features and capabilities that shoppers care about the most.
• Build brand equity directly with shoppers on Google (with helpful recommendations and suggestions on what to buy).

Boost your productivity with AI-powered performance insights

By Joseph Damiani | Jan 7, 2019

Bing Ads has announced the global availability of AI-powered performance insights. Performance insights allow access to valuable data for shaping your business decisions with built-in capabilities to AI-powered data insights. You will be able to apply Bing’s machine learning to easily discover why you’re having performance issues. Performance insights are currently available in two spots of the interface: 1) your Daily performance at the account level and 2) for click and impression KPIs.

Understanding Price in Lead Generation PPC: It’s Not About the Benjamins

By Michelle Morgan | Jan 7, 2019

While an advertiser’s initial touch point in lead generation doesn’t always have a monetary ask, there is still an exchange of time, attention, and information. Here are a few suggestions to consider when making your lead generation really count when you take those factors into consideration.

How to Find New Placements to Target on the Display Network

By Joe Martinez | Jan 7, 2019

Joe Martinez shares a few tactics for finding new placements to target for creating successfully managed placement campaigns in Google Ads. The first place he starts is in the Referrals report in Google Analytics. He finds the sources that are sending the highest quality traffic to the site to create a list of URLs. Using that list, search for them as placements when creating an ad group in Google Ads in Google Display network. Then, he takes a list of websites he knows his target audience visits, but none is a part of Google’s Display Network, and tests them out as a custom affinity audience or a custom intent audience. If he sees certain sites that give acceptable engagement or conversions, he then creates new campaigns or ad groups with these new sites as managed placements. He emphasizes the importance of doing your research before going live!

How to Leverage B2B Lookalike Audiences in the Stages of Your Sales Funnel

By Abby Woodcock | Jan 8, 2019

Your lookalike audiences should be based on converting users, customer lists, and visitors to your website. Abby Woodcock walks us through how to determine the best lookalike audience and how to set those lookalike audiences up for B2B clients. Using Facebook as an example, she then walks us through setting up the most effective sales funnel.

Google Ads Not Working for Your Small Brand? Try Something Different

By Pauline Jakober | Jan 8, 2019

Smaller businesses often find it hard to compete with large brands for Google Ad space. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible, they just have to get creative with their strategy. You may want to focus and narrow your efforts, consider sending samples instead of promoting sales and leverage your Google Ads efforts with other marketing platforms.

4 Tips for Facebook Ad Optimization

By Bethany Bey | Jan 9, 2019

Bethany Bey has 4 tips to increase the number of conversions and decrease CPL when optimizing your Facebook ads. She covers how she approaches segmenting and consolidating the audience, making incremental budget changes, and testing lifetime budgets.

Google Chrome to Expand Ad Blocking Worldwide on July 9th

By Matt Southern | Jan 9, 2019

Google Chrome is expanding its ad blocking worldwide, which will affect sites that repeatedly show disruptive ads. They will be following the ‘Better Ads Standards’ when determining which websites to filter ads on in Chrome, which was developed by the Coalition for Better Ads. Check to make sure you’re not breaking these standards!

3 Tips for Surviving 2019, the Year of Automated PPC

By Frederick Vallaeys | Jan 10, 2019

Automation and tools that you should be paying attention to this year: Selecting the right technology. customizing it with your secret sauce, and monitoring the automation. Frederick Vallaeys offers three valuable insights to getting ahead of the automation boom for 2019. He covers how to assemble the right tools for you, teaching the machine, and monitoring the automation.

How To Write The Best Google Ads Copy & Back It Up on Landing Pages

By Michelle Morgan | Jan 10, 2019

Michelle Morgan offers us an excellent in-depth discussion on the art and science to writing great copy for Google Ads and your landing pages. She covers some technical best practices to follow but encourages you to tap into your artistic side when creating copy that will speak to your audience.

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.