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.
Need Ideas For New Ads? Consider Trolling Competitors
By: Robert Brady | Jun 3, 2019
Trolling in your advertising isn’t for everyone, but if it makes sense for you, you might want to give it a try! Robert Brady highlights the Bud Light and Miller Lite commercials from the Superbowl this past year. There was some back and forth trolling that went on and was great advertising at the end of the day. You do want to make sure your trolling won’t get you into any legal battles, so do your homework! Brady recommends checking out Facebook Ads Library to get fresh details on your competitor’s ads– you’ll be able to find demographic breakdowns on age, gender, and geography for who saw those ads and begin to plan your trolling!
Introducing the LinkedIn Ad Review
By Sean Callahan | Jun 4, 2019
LinkedIn has announced a new monthly feature to their LinkedIn Marketing Blog, the LinkedIn Ad Review. They will highlight Sponsored Content that performed particularly well. They analyze why the headline, visual, and copy work together to get across the brand’s message so well. In general, they recommend that your ads be specific, be human and don’t over think it! This month’s highlight and analysis is an ad from Autodesk.
Create your omnichannel campaign with Local Inventory Ads
By Neha Mohan | Jun 4, 2019
In an effort to bridge the gap between online and physical presence for brick-and-mortar retailers, Microsoft Advertising is announcing Local Inventory Ads. The new advertising format for your Microsoft Shopping Campaigns will allow retailers to showcase products and local retail store information to nearby shoppers on Bing.com. How does it work? Neha Mohan explains, “Based on the inventory information submitted by the retailer, when a customer is near a retailer’s physical store location and searches for a product carried by the retailer, we show the ad with an In-store notification. When the ad is clicked, we can direct the customer to the retailer’s omnichannel storefront to find information like the store location, product availability and more, or the customer can be sent to a Bing hosted storefront displaying similar information.”
10 Amazing Tips to Write Better Mobile PPC Ads
By Lisa Raehsler | Jun 4, 2019
Mobile PPC ads are largely one-size-fits-all with streamlined ad options. However, Lisa Raehsler takes the argument that you should be customizing your mobile ads to enhance the user experience and your ROI. She offers advice using 10 ways you can improve your mobile ads using ad copy and various extensions.
Highlights From Google’s Keyword Planner Update
By Chris Vollmer | Jun 4, 2019
Chris Vollmer highlights a few new features to Google’s Keyword Planner update that he thinks digital marketers should be aware of for enhanced audience insights and structural suggestions. Grouped Ideas lets you see groupings based on your keywords, which is particularly helpful if you’re starting from scratch on a campaign. Monthly Keyword Trend Insights is now hoverable and downloadable so you can use the insights, it was a tiny graph before. You can now also save keyword ideas directly into your existing campaigns or into a plan, and Google will project daily budgets for that plan. Google added a new column called “Competition (indexed value)” using a scale of 0-100 to gauge how competitive you can expect the market for a particular keyword to be.
How to Spot Click Fraud (and Prevent It)
By Tom Whatley | June 5, 2019
There are several ways to track and eliminate click fraud on your Google Ads account. In this guide, Tom Whatley examines what click fraud is, how scammers do it and what your business can do to prevent it. Click fraud happens when a paid advertisement is clicked repeatedly on a website to drain revenue from an advertiser or gain revenue for a website hosting the ad. Google has its own investigation team for click fraud detection and prevention, and will not charge the account for fraudulent clicks, but they do miss some fraudulent activities. These include click farms, bot farms and bad actors in the Adsense partner network. You can prevent click fraud by:
1. Being Proactive in the Analysis of Your Ad Data
2. Excluding Unwanted IP Addresses
3. Adjusting (and Excluding) Geographical Areas Through Ad Targeting
4. Enlisting Specialist Software to Track Suspicious Activity
Track your ad tests at scale with this advanced AdWords script
By Wesley Parker | Jun 5, 2019
Wesley Parker shares a script from his agency that “allow[s] you to see quickly a top line summary of all of the split tests that are running within your account.
It also allows you to quickly determine when an ad test has finished, even if you’re running hundreds of tests at a time.
Better still, it will notify you of the completion, so you can go into your account and create a new ad copy.”
PPC Math Made Easy
By Rachael Law | Jun 5, 2019
Does all the math in PPC give you anxiety? Or maybe you’re new to PPC and can’t keep all the equations straight? Rachael Law has put together a comprehensive guide to all of the commonly used PPC math equations and how and when to use them.
How to Scale with Lookalike Audiences
By Etgar Shpivak | Jun 6, 2019
Lookalike Audiences have become a digital marketing staple and are available across many different platforms. Given a group of users, the ad platform’s algorithm can assemble a second group that resembles the original one. Etgar Shpivak takes a deep dive into what lookalike audiences are and what you need to know to build effective lookalike audiences. He explains how to choose your seed audience and how to keep that seed consistent for the best results. He also gives examples of what a great seed audience should look like.
How I Lowered Brand CPA By 90% While Increasing Conversions
By Zach Bruner | Jun 6, 2019
Zach Bruner recommends that if you’re using broad match keywords in your brand campaign, you might want to double check to make sure they aren’t doing more harm than good. He shares an experiment he ran by pausing broad match keywords that lowered his brand CPA by 90% and increased conversions, leaving budget to go to other places.
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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