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.
The Complete Guide to Ad Extensions
By Tom Whatley | Aug 14, 2019
If you’re looking to capture more SERP real estate and drive higher conversions, then you’ll want to check out Tom Whatley’s guide for everything to do with ad extensions. He reviews how to set up manual ad extensions, as well as walks you through the 10 manual ad extensions and when it is best to use them. He also reviews how to set up automated ad extensions, and examines 6 automated dynamic ad extensions and when to use them.
Facebook campaign budget optimization: How marketers must prepare for September 1, 2019
By Brian Bowman | Aug 14, 2019
Facebook’s Ads Manager campaign budget optimization (CBO) will become mandatory for all ad campaigns as of September 1, 2019, are you ready for the change? If you don’t want a rude awaking on September 1st, you should start testing CBO now. While you will be giving up some control, overall CBO is helpful to manage less when Facebook automatically shifts the ad budget to whichever ad set in a campaign is most effective, you should see higher ROAS, and you will still be able to control spending with ad set spending limits.
Goodbye, Average Position: Everything You Need to Know
By Jess Armstrong | Aug 14, 2019
Earlier this year, Google Ads announced that it will be sunsetting the average position metric. The average position metric had no way of telling you how often your ad was appearing at the top, making budget decisions difficult. While removing average position, they launched four new metrics that advertisers could use in its place:
- Top impression rate [Impr. (Top) %]: The percent of your ad impressions that were delivered anywhere above the organic search results.
- Absolute top impression rate [Impr. (Abs. Top) %]: The percent of your ad impressions that were delivered as the very first ad above the organic search results.
- Search top impression share [Search top IS]: A percentage indicating how frequently your ad appeared above the organic results compared to the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive in that location.
- Search absolute top impression share [Search abs. top IS]: A percentage indicating how frequently your ad appeared as the first ad above the organic search results compared to the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive in the absolute top location.
Facebook Dynamic Creative: Level Up Your Ads
By Aaron Childs | Aug 15, 2019
Are you ready to level up your Facebook Ads using the dynamic creative feature? The feature works by giving an ad several options for images, ad copy, and headlines, then it combines all these to find what variation/combination works best for your given objective. Effectively, this takes the work out of having to set up 15 different ads or 10 various A/B tests to find out what works by putting all that into one single ad so you can get results and learnings in real-time. Aaron Childs explains how to set the dynamic creative up and provides a link to a case study that shows impressive results.
The Simple Reason Why Your B2B Lead Gen Conversion Rates Are Completely Wrong
By Oli Gardner | Aug 15, 2019
Oli Gardner suggests that you may be calculating your B2B lead generation conversion rates correctly because you may not be not using the correct data. He asserts that you should approach your conversion rates using High Marketing IQ– going past surface-level findings to understand the true value of your generated leads. High IQ marketers apply a more intelligent method for calculating their ROI by weeding out poor qualifications like spam form fills or fake email addresses on forms. The true conversions happen when a lead gives you their business email address, and these are the numbers you should be using in your calculations, even if you need to account for them manually.
How to use PPC data to drive more SEO traffic
By Adelina Karpenkova | Aug 15, 2019
Adelina Karpenkova explains how to analyze your paid campaigns to determine which keywords resulted in the most significant number of conversions and focus on these phrases to improve your SEO. Using high CTR keywords for SEO will allow you to find top of funnel content ideas for your website. You can also track what keywords your competitors are bidding on for SEO ideas.
Are your Google text ads getting truncated? Here’s what to consider
By Ginny Marvin | Aug 16, 2019
Truncated headlines and descriptions in expanded text ads seem to be happening more often lately with certain ad renderings, which frequently include no ad extensions. This makes Ginny Marvin ask if the pendulum is swinging back to simpler ads? Truncation will happen depending on pixel size, so wider characters (‘m’) will take up more space than narrower characters (‘i’). But is truncation happening more frequently? Marvin explains that she’s seeing more truncated text ads on desktop at the top of the page versus the bottom. Ultimately, it really comes down to how Google is experimenting with how they display the ads.
Creating Successful PPC Ad Copy for B2B and B2C
By Bridgette Hernandez | Aug 16, 2019
Bridgette Hernandez explains how you can create a successful PPC ad copy for both B2B and B2C sectors depending on their expectations and your marketing goals. The benefits to using PPC for your brand include instant results in terms of lead engagement,
increased brand recognition, awareness and industry authority, streamlined data collection and easier performance analysis, and a higher return on investment (ROI) compared to organic optimization. Hernandez provides five suggestions to help improve your ad copy.
Google Ads to remove accelerated ad delivery option next month
By Ginny Marvin | Aug 19, 2019
Google Ads announced that the accelerated delivery option will be removed and standard delivery will be the only option for Search and Shopping campaigns, as well as for campaigns with shared budgets. With standard ad delivery, your budget is paced throughout the day or the periods of time you’ve scheduled your ads to run. While accelerated delivery is popular with Shopping campaigns, it’s not necessarily efficient for other campaigns that have a daily cap, spending the day’s budget too early in the day. Google recommends choosing the maximize conversions or maximize clicks bidding strategies to indicate your performance priority for campaigns that had been using accelerated delivery, and using an ad schedule to manage when your ads are shown and bid adjustments to increase and decrease bids during certain times of the day.
3 Killer Strategies for Custom Affinity Audience Campaigns
By Cassie Oumedian | Aug 19, 2019
Cassie Oumedian shares 3 PPC strategies for using custom affinity audience targeting, performance results & key lessons learned from managing custom affinity targeting. With custom affinity audiences, you can determine your target affinity audience based on specific URLs and categories on the Google Display Network. The 3 strategies include:
1. Top Performing Placements
2. Competitor Targeting
3. Interest + Custom Affinity Targeting
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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