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 Future-Proof Your Marketing in the Era of AI
By Pam Neely | Jan 29, 2019
AI and Machine Learning are nothing new to advertising. To make the most out of your marketing, you should approach AI in the following ways. First, get educated about the differences between AI, deep learning, machine learning, and neural networks. Next, you should clean out your data so that your data is structured, organized, and easy for machine learning to understand. Then, you’ll need to clearly define your goals and definitions because the machine will be following your instructions implicitly. Lastly, you should be optimizing for voice search. AI and Machine Learning require lots of data to work, and it does its best when that data is clear, structured, and organized.
Top 3 Strategies to Get the Most out of Quality Score
By Navah Hopkins | Jan 30, 2019
A high-Quality Score isn’t a guarantee of meaningful ROI, just cheaper clicks. In fact, branded campaigns have high-quality scores because of their perfect keyword to ad to landing page relevancy, higher than average click-through rates, and they often lead to the home page with better user experience. Navah Hopkins was curious as to what would happen if she filtered out branded campaigns from account performance. She had interesting findings for effect on CPC, conversions, impression share, and CTR. She put together a list of top 3 ways to get the most out of your Quality Score:
1. Bid to Budget Theory: No Click Should Cost More Than 10% of Your Budget
2. Account Structure Theory: Setting Yourself up for Ease of Management vs. Profit vs. Control
3. Ad Copy & Landing Page Theory: 66% of Quality Score Is in the Ad & Landing Page Experience
Agencies say search, social spend will rise, but increases target 5 platforms
By Ginny Marvin | Jan 30, 2019
According to Marketing Land’s Digital Agency Survey 2019, media spending on search and social platforms is expected to rise this year, but increases will be concentrated among a handful of platforms. Google, YouTube, Facebook/Instagram, Amazon, and LinkedIn are forecast to see the biggest gains in ad spend revenues for the year. Facebook and Google lead, Facebook ad spend not hurt by data controversies, and Amazon and LinkedIn break into the top five.
What Ecommerce Brand Bidders Can Learn from Amazon Advertising
By Hendrik Kühl | Jan 30,2019
Hendrik Kühl walks us through step-by-step how B2C brands can leverage learnings from Amazon advertising to increase their chances of success when it comes to competitor brand term bidding. He guides us through:
- Research User Consideration and Product Similarity
- Match Amazon ASINs to Product Names
- Leverage Reviews to Write PPC Ad Copy that Converts
- Using Amazon Data to Get a Leg Up in 2019
PPC Geotargeting Best Practices Guide
By Ilya Cherepakhin | Jan 30, 2019
Ilya Cherepakhin makes a strong argument for why geotargeting is a key element to review in any paid search campaign. He outlines specifics in his guide:
1. Avoid Unnecessary Hyper-Targeting
2. Split Your Campaign by Time Zones
3. Group Similarly Performing Markets
4. Target Strategically Important Markets Separately from the Rest
5. Set up a Scalable Naming Convention
6. Don’t Forget Negative Locations
7. Chose the Right Targeting Method
8. Don’t Set & Forget
Google’s Best Practices for Improving Your Google Ads Optimization Score
By Matt Southern | Jan 31, 2019
In case you were looking to up your Google Ads Optimization Score, you’re in luck! Google recently released a set of best practices to help Google Ads users improve their optimization score. They offer three areas of best practice: efficient account management, apply recommendations that support business goals, and analyze recommendations on your own terms (ads & extensions, bids & budgets, keywords & targeting, repairs).
First Page Search Bids: Should You Go All In?
By Lauren Rosner | Jan 31, 2019
For those of you that are poker players, this is a fun read! Lauren Rosner makes great comparisons for first-page search bids and the game of poker. She enjoys looking at keywords that live below the first page and tries to understand the impact of giving those keywords a slight boost, not huge, but just a nudge. She outlines a whole bunch of poker moves as she walks you through her approach to projecting impact of keywords buried at the bottom of the deck and how to evaluate if the financial risk is worth getting them to see the light again.
Getting a Little Help with Your Bids – ECPC vs CPA Bidding
By Jacob Fairclough | Jan 31, 2019
Google Ads lets you choose two advanced bidding options beyond CPC bidding: enhanced cost-per-click (ECPC) and cost-per-acquisition (CPA) bidding. Jacob Fairclough expertly defines and describes the two options as well as suggests when to use which option for the best results.
Top 10 User Engagement KPIs to Measure
By Maddy Osman | Feb 3, 2019
Content engagement metrics are important because they show how your content strategy aligns with user interest and overall profitability. Maddy Osman shares the top 10 User Engagement KPIs you should be measuring:
1. Pageviews
2. Time on Page
3. Bounce Rate
4. Top Exit Pages
5. Pages per Session
6. Page/Scroll Depth
7. Unique Visitors
8. New vs. Returning Visitors
9. Conversion Rate
10. Abandonment Rate
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.
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