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.

AdWords Express Officially Rolled Into Google Ads

By Robert Brady | Jan 14, 2019

AdWords Express campaigns have been moved into Google Ads and they are now part of the Smart campaigns. These two offerings will now be manageable under the same UI. And, while Adwords Express will behave essentially the same for advertisers, it will also expose them to the bigger possibilities on the entire Google Ads platform.

3 Big Budget Roadblocks (And How to Blast Past Them)

By Navah Hopkins | Jan 15, 2019

Setting the budget for your campaigns is often hard to do– if you set it too high you run the risk of unspent budge and high CPA, and if it’s set too low you won’t get enough clicks to be profitable. Navah Hopkins offers three great bits of advice to overcoming common roadblocks you may come across with your budgets. If your keywords don’t fit the budget, and the budget can’t move, you may consider leveraging close variants to get cheaper versions of the keywords you want. If you find that you need to ramp up leads fast but don’t have enough budget to let Google Search be your volume play, Hopkins suggests leveraging networks with cheaper auction prices and blitzing power so your search campaign can remarket to them. Lastly, if the budget isn’t the problem because you’re not allowed to bid more than a certain amount per click, you should use bidding strategies designed to teach the source of the bid limit what auction prices you need to deliver value.

Tracking Embedded YouTube Videos with Google Tag Manager

By Tim Jensen | Jan 15, 2019

Google Tag Manager offers built-in triggers allowing you to track ad performance, without having to write a line of code. Tim Jensen walks us through setting up tracking for embedded YouTube videos using Google Tag Manager (GTM), as well as how to view the resulting data in Google Analytics. He guides us through setting up YouTube triggers, the Google Analytics Tags, and how to start tracking.

Curate Your Audience to Get Better Results from Your Digital Campaigns

By Rachel Poulos | Jan 16, 2019

Targeting the right audience will set your campaigns up for lower costs with personalized content and messaging, creating user segmentation, and finding better-qualified leads. Rachel Poulos shares her advice for finding your target audience. She recommends ways to thoroughly understand the product or service and how to segment your audience.

Google “Leaked” Lead Generation Playbook

By Roger Montti | Jan 16, 2019

A Google User Experience Playbook has been leaked about Lead Generation and what a publisher can do to generate more sales or form submissions. The document states that lead generation should be trustworthy and offer a clear value proposition that solves a problem. The playbook also suggests 10 areas to optimize for lead generation that falls into four general categories: Conversion optimization, Solution messaging, Trust building, and Usability.

The playbook also advises to review these areas for optimizing lead generation forms:

• Mark required fields with an asterisk
• Use inline validation
• Use autofill
• Reduce number of fields (remove optional fields, use full name instead of first/last, hide company and address line 2 by default, hide billing by default)
• Use correct keypads
• Don’t use dropdowns for inputs with < 4 options, instead opt for buttons
• Use steppers, sliders, or open field input for numerical entry rather than large dropdowns
• Use pagination or a progress bar if more than 2 steps in conversion flow

Furthermore, the playbook suggests that making your CTAs more descriptive, including social proof, and mobile optimization will further assist you in your lead generation efforts.

Easily manage Dynamic Search Ads campaigns with page feeds

By Joseph Damiani and Parinita Rahi | Jan 16, 2019

Bing Ads announces that they are rolling out page feeds for Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) to all DSA customers over the next few weeks. Using page feeds will help you save time when managing DSA campaigns by removing the need to create targets for each of your website URLs, or groups of URLs. Instead of creating targets, you can now simply upload a list or “feed” of URLs. By leveraging a feed in your DSA campaign, it’s easy to improve your campaign’s overall website coverage as well as indicate to Bing which URLs are of particular value to you.

Paid Search Attribution: What to Pay Attention To

By Daniel Gilbert | Jan 17, 2019

Daniel Gilbert shares guidance on what the important factors to focus on attribution are for your paid campaigns. While Google Ad’s feature Data-Driven Attribution (DDA) attribution model is useful, the amount of time and testing it requires may make it a lower priority in your paid strategy. He reviews a few other strategies, such as Google 360, Google Marketing Platform, Facebook, and independent analytics companies.

Sayonara Gemini Search. Long Live the Bing.

By Gareth Cleevely | Jan 17, 2019

Say goodbye to Yahoo Search as it will be powered by Bing going forward. In the US, Gemini Search will be depreciated and Yahoo’s search engine will be powered by Bing. The changeover will begin March 15th and conclude at the end of March. Bing Ads will assume responsibility for all paid search ads on Yahoo and Yahoo’s partners/properties after the switch. Gareth Cleevely recommends taking these steps to be prepared for the upcoming changes:

• Look at your current Gemini Search account to help estimate the forthcoming impact.
• Ensure Bing parity! Be sure to fully audit your Bing Ads accounts and confirm that all relevant opportunity is being captured.
• Analyze current mobile performance and determine an action plan to improve it.
• Check that all IO’s, budgets, and pacing plans can accommodate an increase in traffic.
• Reach out to your Yahoo and Bing reps for more details and any nuances which may occur with your accounts in particular.

15 Important Conversion Metrics & Business KPIs You Should Track

By Anna Crowe | Jan 18, 2019

To help guide you to get the most out of your marketing data, Search Engine Journal takes a deep dive into the big picture of business conversion metrics to help you determine the best KPIs to track. They outline the top 15 metrics you should be tracking and instruct how those KPIs are measured.

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.