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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.

Meta’s first generative AI-powered tools for advertisers are here

By Nicola Agius | Oct 4, 2023 | Search Engine Land

Meta Ads Manager is introducing generative AI-powered features for advertisers to enhance productivity, personalization, and performance. These new tools include background generation, image expansion, and text variation. Background generation creates multiple backgrounds for product images, enabling advertisers to tailor assets for different audiences. Image expansion allows adjustments for various aspect ratios across different surfaces, reducing the need to repurpose creative assets. Text variation generates multiple ad text versions based on the original copy to highlight product selling points. Meta plans to offer more generative AI features for advertisers, ultimately streamlining ad creation and enhancing strategic work like audience analysis.

Testing Meta’s AI-powered Advantage+ targeting: What we learned and what to expect

By Sean Johnston | Oct 4, 2023 | Search Engine Land

Meta is further advancing its efforts to automate paid social advertising with the introduction of Advantage+ audience targeting. This is part of Meta’s broader suite of automation products, including Advantage+ shopping and Advantage+ creative, designed to streamline the setup and optimization of ad campaigns. Advantage+ targeting allows Meta’s algorithms to determine the ideal audience for an ad, with advertisers providing optional input in the form of audience controls or suggestions. By trusting the algorithm to decide who to target, what ads to serve, and what creative to use, the goal is to achieve better results by reducing manual intervention. However, testing of Advantage+ targeting suggests that while it may lead to cheaper upfront leads, the quality and conversion rate of these leads may not be as high as with more targeted approaches. To address this issue, advertisers are advised to use lead filtering techniques within the Meta lead form to weed out unqualified leads and create a strategy that exploits the platform’s advantages while protecting against poor-quality leads.

6 tips to track and analyze PPC results

By Grace Mante | Oct 6, 2023 | Search Engine Land

When tracking and analyzing PPC performance, it’s essential to focus on specific aspects to gain valuable insights:

1. Goals: Base your reporting on primary and secondary goals or key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to your company or client. Align your reporting with one or two KPIs over time to make optimizations that matter.
2. Metrics: Identify the most crucial metrics for your goals. For example, if conversion volume is your primary KPI, prioritize metrics like conversions and conversion rate. Analyze trends and insights related to these metrics.
3. Pacing: Monitor your budget pacing in relation to your primary goal. Adjust budgets based on your performance relative to budget allocation and efficiency.
4. Bidding: Evaluate your bid strategy and ensure alignment with your primary goal. Adjust bid targets to optimize for your specific KPIs.
5. Audiences: Tailor your reporting to the audience that will be reviewing it. Provide actionable insights and recommendations, avoiding jargon and acronyms for a broader audience.
6. Automated Reports: Leverage automation to streamline reporting. Set up scheduled reports in advertising platforms like Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, or SA360 to receive data directly in your inbox. Use these reports as a starting point for deeper analysis across channels.

How to Avoid Search Budget Cannibalization For A Better Share Of Spend

By Jonathan Kagan | Oct 9, 2023 | Search Engine Journal

Shared budgets, also known as portfolio budgets, can be useful in preventing overspending in a single advertising engine. However, they can favor high-volume or high-demand campaigns over others. This can lead to budget cannibalization, where one campaign with high traffic but low conversion rates consumes a disproportionate amount of the shared budget, reducing the performance of other campaigns sharing the budget. Jonathan Kagan recommends setting daily budget caps for individual campaigns and manually reallocating funds based on performance. Shared budgets may be appropriate for campaigns with similar assets, targeting, or match types, but careful monitoring is essential to avoid budget imbalances.

Cross-Channel Advertising: Challenges & Strategies (With an Example)

By Oleksii Chychyrko | Oct 10, 2023 | Optmyzr

Cross-channel advertising involves advertising across multiple digital platforms to reach a broader audience. It differs from multi-channel advertising by integrating campaigns to deliver a unified message. Major players in cross-channel advertising include Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and TikTok Ads, each offering unique strengths. Managing cross-channel advertising poses challenges such as maintaining consistent messaging, tracking performance across platforms, budget optimization, and audience segmentation. To overcome these challenges, marketers can create platform-specific content, use a centralized analytics dashboard, employ cross-platform remarketing, maintain unified customer profiles, synchronize campaign launches, and optimize for cross-channel conversions.

Google Bets On AI-Powered Video Ads To Disrupt Social Media Advertising

By Matt G. Southern | Oct 10, 2023 | Search Engine Journal

Google has introduced Demand Gen Campaigns, a new advertising product that leverages AI to create highly targeted video and image ads on platforms like YouTube and Google Discover. These ads are designed for pre-and mid-roll placements on YouTube and are optimized for mobile with formats like bumper ads and carousels. Advertisers can customize ad content and messaging for different audience segments. The product also uses AI to identify “lookalike” audiences based on a brand’s existing customers. Demand Gen is Google’s response to evolving consumer viewing habits, providing advertisers with visually compelling ads tailored to changing user behaviors. It aims to compete with other social advertising platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

Hidden Gems in PPC: 10 Underutilized Levers Across Google and Microsoft Ads

By Navah Hopkins | Oct 11, 2023 | Search Engine Journal

Navah Hopkins highlights several “hidden levers” in digital advertising, often overlooked but crucial for optimizing ad campaigns:

1. Competitor Audiences: Using the “competitor audience segment” feature, advertisers can target users who have visited websites frequented by their target audience, including those of competitors. This allows advertisers to tap into the audience cultivated by competitors.
2. Search Term Filters: The search terms report has become instrumental for prioritizing keywords over keyword planner suggestions. Filtering and analyzing this report helps ensure effective keyword selection.
3. Negatives At Every Structural Level: Using negative keywords is pivotal for blocking irrelevant or unproductive search queries, helping optimize budget allocation.
4. Audience And Placement Targets & Exclusions: Including audience and placement targets/exclusions is vital for precise ad targeting, ensuring budget efficiency and meaningful engagement with the ideal customer.
5. Ad Group Versus Campaign-Level Settings: The article explains the nuances of settings across different advertising platforms, such as Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and Amazon Ads. Understanding these settings is crucial for planning and budget allocation.
6. Segments For Precision Analysis: Utilizing segments in campaign data helps advertisers dive deeper into network, conversion data, time, location, and device metrics, providing a more accurate view of campaign performance.
7. Conversion Tracking: Adjusting conversion settings, including the time window for phone call conversions, is essential for accurate data measurement and bidding optimization. Primary and secondary conversion settings need to be configured correctly to measure what truly matters to the business.
8. Hidden Reports: Exploring underutilized reports like the Change History report, Call Extension Report, and the Insight Section, including the Search Term Report, can provide valuable insights and improve account performance.
9. Shopping Attributes In Merchant Center: Regularly updating and customizing product feeds with new attributes in Google Merchant Center can boost campaign targeting and return on ad spend.

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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