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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.

Google Announces “Things to Do” Free Listing & Ad Unit

By Amy Bishop | Sep 22, 2021

Google has announced new ad units designed to help folks find attractions, tours, and activities within the SERP. Things to Do ads are delivered for queries about attractions, tickets, and queries seeking out tours and entertainment. Not only will searchers receive basic information about the point of interest, they’ll also be delivered booking links for basic admission and other ticket options. Advertisers can also promote additional details like pricing, images and reviews, which will be delivered at the top of the SERP. Advertisers have the ability to promote their listings with ads but there is also a free option. Much like shopping ads, advertisers can showcase their inventory, including attraction admission tickets, tours, and activities on the SERP. For advertisers that promote their listings with ads, they will only be charged when someone clicks the ad.

Google Updates Keyword Matching Processes for Phrase & Broad Match

By Amy Bishop | Sep 23, 2021

Google has announced changes to keyword matching, including a change that prefers the phrase and broad keywords which are identical to the query string. Google is also updating the matching process for queries that don’t have an identical keyword match.

Earlier this year, Google announced that an exact match keyword that is identical to the query string will be preferred whenever that keyword is eligible to match, in order to help reduce account complexity.

Now, Google is announcing the same for phrase and broad match.

For example, if the query string buy a dog bowl is eligible to match multiple broad match keywords in your account (like dog bowl, purchase a dog bowl, and buy a dog bowl), Google will give preference to the identical keyword.

This Change is now applicable to both broad and phrase match.

The goal of this change is to allow advertisers to feel more comfortable using broad match keywords, without fear of losing control of existing keywords or tighter match types.

Google Ads to Rollout New Advertiser Pages With a Focus on Transparency

By Amy Bishop | Sep 23, 2021

Google has announced “advertiser pages”, which allow users to learn more about the advertiser before visiting their site or making a purchase. Advertiser pages will include enhanced ad disclosures for advertisers that have completed the verification process. These features are similar to the content that users see when they click “Why Am I seeing this Ad?” on Facebook. By clicking “About this Ad”, users will be able to see things like:

• Why they are seeing this ad content.
• The advertiser’s brand name.
• The advertiser’s location.
• Additional ads from that advertiser over the past 30 days.

Users will also be able to click “stop seeing this ad” to mute ads from advertisers that they aren’t interested in and/or report the ads that they believe violate policies – all from the advertiser page.

The goal is to provide more information to help differentiate credible advertisers in the ecosystem while limiting the ability of bad actors to misrepresent themselves.

How to Create Facebook In-Stream Ads People Will Watch

By Corinna Keefe | Sep 24, 2021

“Facebook in-stream ads offer a huge potential audience. And with up to 10 minutes of airtime, there’s plenty of room for creativity,” writes Corinna Keefe. A large potential audience exists because creators and publishers have to meet stringent requirements before they can monetize their videos with ad placements, at least 10,000 followers and 30,000 video views in the last 60 days in an eligible country. Keefe shares these ten ways to increase views, clicks, and brand recall for in-stream ads on Facebook:

1. Start Strong
2. Create a Distinctive Look
3. Give a Simple Call to Action
4. Use Large Print
5. Introduce Your Star Characters in the First 3 Seconds
6. Create a Sense of Intimacy
7. Use Audio Branding as Well as Visuals
8. Include Captions for Speech
9. Mix Static and Video Ads
10. Support Your Facebook In-Stream Ads With Branded Content

10 Reasons Your Facebook Ads Are Not Delivering (And What to Do About It)

By Mark Quadros | Sep 24, 2021

If you’ve published an ad but don’t see it getting the reach you expected or wondering if your Facebook ads are delivering at all, Mark Quadros shares ten reasons why your ads are not delivering and how to fix it:

1. Your ad post is not available
2. Your spending limit has been reached
3. Your audience is too small
4. Your ads are disapproved or limited
5. Your bid/budget parameters aren’t set right
6. Your ads have limited engagement
7. Your audiences are overlapping
8. Your ad is stuck in review
9. You’re facing scheduling issues
10. Your optimization goal is unrealistic

The future of attribution is data-driven

By Vidhya Srinivasan | Sep 27, 2021

Google Ads is investing in machine learning tools to more accurately understand how each marketing touchpoint contributes to a conversion, all while respecting user privacy. They will be making data-driven attribution the default attribution model for all new conversion actions in Google Ads. “Data-driven attribution gives you more accurate results by analyzing all of the relevant data about the marketing moments that led up to a conversion. Data-driven attribution in Google Ads takes multiple signals into account, including the ad format and the time between an ad interaction and the conversion. We also use results from holdback experiments to make our models more accurate and calibrate them to better reflect the true incremental value of your ads. And like all of our measurement solutions, we respect people’s decisions about how their data should be used and have strict policies against covert techniques, like fingerprinting, that can compromise user privacy,” explains Vidhya Srinivasan.

Microsoft Advertising Launches Open Beta for Credit Card Ads

By Amy Bishop | Sep 28, 2021

Microsoft Advertising announced an open beta for a new ad unit, called credit card ads. Credit card ads are available to advertisers targeting the United States and Canada. Credit card ads are feed-based, dynamically generated ads. The ads are created purely from the feeds – and are not triggered by keywords, or site content.

Feeds for credit card ads include things like the card issuer, cash-back percentages, rewards, annual fees, and sign-up bonuses. Microsoft suggests including as much detail as possible in the ads, as more detail in the feeds can correlate to more detail in the ads.

Credit card ads are available on the right rail of the Bing SERP, alongside text ads. While advertisers do not input keywords, Microsoft shared some of the types of queries that credit card ads will show for, including: brand name, card category, credit level, and more.

Microsoft notes that the credit card ads auction is separate from the text ads auction. Advertisers can leverage both the credit card ads auction and also participate in the text ad auction with regular search campaigns, meaning that there is an opportunity to serve ads in the text ad block and the credit card block within the same auction.

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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