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 Your Microsoft Advertising Campaigns for Better Results
By Jacques van der Wilt | Jul 5, 2023 | Marin One Blog

Jacques van der Wilt provides 13 tips for optimizing Microsoft Advertising campaigns to generate better results. They highlight the importance of Microsoft Advertising as an effective platform for conversions and emphasize the need for optimization. The tips include importing high-performing Google Ads campaigns, experimenting with bid strategies, setting up conversion tracking, optimizing keywords using data, monitoring search terms and adding negative keywords, improving quality scores, writing effective ad copy, using bid adjustments with targeting, experimenting with different match types in ad groups, maximizing impression share, utilizing ad recommendations, and optimizing landing pages. By implementing these tips, advertisers can enhance the performance of their Microsoft Advertising campaigns and achieve better results.
Google Clarifies Value-Based Bidding In Week-Long Social Series
By Brooke Osmundson | Jul 6, 2023 | Search Engine Journal

Ginny Marvin, Google Ads Liason, conducted a week-long series of posts on LinkedIn and Twitter to address common questions and misconceptions about value-based bidding (VBB). The series covered the basics of VBB, campaign inputs and settings, informing and evaluating performance, and answering advertiser questions. Marvin explained that VBB seeks to maximize conversion value within a budget and optimize for auctions predicted to deliver high conversion value. She emphasized the importance of setting values for tracked conversions and feeding the right first-party data into Google Ads. Marvin also provided insights on optimizing volume, measuring performance, using multiple conversion actions with different values, assigning values to offline conversions for lead generation, and optimizing for profit or other key performance indicators using target ROAS (tROAS). Overall, the series aimed to clarify the workings of VBB and address common concerns raised by advertisers.
How to get the most out of PPC for your SaaS brand
By Sophie Logan | Jul 7, 2023 | Search Engine Land

In the crowded market of SaaS brands, it’s crucial to use PPC effectively to stand out and attract new customers. To optimize PPC campaigns, SaaS brands should consider these key strategies:
- Running cold audience display campaigns can increase brand awareness and influence potential customers who are unaware of specific brands.
- Custom segments, in-market audiences, and affinity audiences can be targeted to reach the right audience effectively.
- Using customer match exclusions helps allocate the budget to reach potential new customers instead of existing ones.
- Remarketing lists can keep potential customers engaged and increase the likelihood of conversion. Engaging in competitor bidding is another strategy to outsmart competitors by targeting their branded keywords.
- Optimizing ad copy to be persuasive and informative, using language that resonates with the target audience, can make a strong first impression.
Demystifying Event Tracking in Google Analytics 4: A Comprehensive Tutorial for Marketers
By Alessandro Colarossi | Jul 10, 2023 | WordStream

GA4 offers powerful event tracking capabilities that provide marketers with actionable insights to improve their marketing strategies. Event tracking in GA4 allows marketers to gather detailed information on user engagement, including button clicks, video views, and form submissions. Compared to Universal Analytics, GA4’s event tracking is more flexible and customizable, offering greater data accuracy. Marketers can implement event tracking in GA4 using Google Tag Manager, which simplifies the process of managing and deploying tracking codes. This article provides a step-by-step guide on implementing custom events in GA4 and highlights the benefits of event tracking for businesses.
How to make your Google Ads brand campaigns more efficient
By Jackson Mc Kee | Jul 10, 2023 | Search Engine Land

This article discusses how a European fintech business optimized their brand campaigns on Google Ads to lower CPCs and improve profitability. They challenged the status quo and identified inefficiencies in their PPC campaigns, particularly with Google’s target impression share and smart bidding. Through data analysis and segmentation, they split their brand keywords into two campaigns and implemented different bidding strategies. The results were significant reductions in CPCs and improvements in ROI, allowing them to allocate more budget towards new business acquisition. The article emphasizes the importance of staying critical, using smart bidding effectively, and continuously improving performance in PPC marketing.
Instagram Partnership Ads: 6 Ways to Use More Branded Content on Instagram
By Anna Sonnenberg | Jul 10, 2023 | Social Media Examiner

Anna Sonnenberg discusses six ways to use Instagram partnership ads to enhance paid campaigns and promote third-party content that mentions a brand. Instagram recently rebranded branded content ads as partnership ads, allowing brands to amplify various types of user-generated content beyond paid partnerships. Sonnenberg explores different types of partner content that can be included in Instagram ads, such as paid partnerships, collaborations, product tags, people tags, mentions, and expanded partnerships. She also provides insights on setting up brand partnerships on Instagram and creating effective partnership ad campaigns.
8 Microsoft Advertising Updates Including Predictive Targeting And Generative AI For RSAs
By Kristi Hines | Jul 11, 2023 | Search Engine Journal

Microsoft Advertising has announced several updates for July 2023, aiming to enhance advertising capabilities and help advertisers reach more customers effectively. The updates include the introduction of Predictive Targeting, an AI-based tool for increasing ad conversions, integration of generative AI into responsive search ads, RSA IF functions for sophisticated targeting and customization, automated multimedia ads within Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) groups, extension of Property Promotion Ads to include vacation rentals, enhancements to Universal Event Tracking (UET), availability of data-driven attribution (DDA) reporting, and deprecation of legacy features in Keyword Planner. These updates aim to improve campaign efficiency, provide better targeting options, and offer more comprehensive analytics.
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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