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.
Your Guide to Optimizing Amazon PPC
By Peter Phillips | Aug 27, 2019
Amazon PPC is one of the best ways brands can reach a massive audience that is actively researching what products they are ready to buy. With that advertising opportunity, comes competition. Amazon PPC management uses a bidding system to help businesses get to the top of the browser’s search results. Optimizing for Amazon PPC requires ads that are both useful for the customer, as well as providing enough information for A9, Amazon’s ad ranking algorithm, to place the ad at the top of relevant searches. Peter Phillips shares how Amazon Advertising works, why it’s essential to understand and comply with A9 algorithms, and how to build your brand.
How to Build a Cross-Channel Lead Generation Strategy in 4 Steps
By Brett McHale | Aug 28, 2019
Cross-channel marketing is important to your lead generation strategy, but figuring out how the channels relate to each other and how much budget to allocate to each can be tricky. Brett McHale shares his four steps to building a strong cross-channel lead generation strategy, including:
1. Set baseline costs to inform your full-funnel strategy
2. Track and report your results
3. Allocate your budget based on intent
4. Define your sales cycle from conversion to customer
How to Sell Like Crazy with Facebook Slideshow Ads
By Akvile DeFazio | Aug 28, 2019
Video ads are highly effective, but not everyone takes advantage of them because of the high production costs associated with creating video ads. Especially small businesses that don’t have that kind of budget. Facebook’s Slideshow Ads offer a great alternative to more expensive video ad productions. Slideshow ads create an immersive experience and they help your brand come to life by telling your story. Akvile DeFazio shows you how to set up a Slideshow Ad on Facebook, as well as a few tips to optimize your campaigns.
Facebook Rolls Out Automated Lead Generation in Messenger
By Matt Southern | Aug 29, 2019
Facebook’s click-to-Messenger ads are launching automated lead generation to qualify leads in Messenger and take the conversation to their preferred channel. Businesses can integrate Messenger with their CRM provider to identify qualified leads. Then, Pages can manually continue the conversation through Pages Inbox, Pages Manager App, or a third-party live chat provider.
So Long, SKAGs; Hello, Single Theme Ad Groups
By Navah Hopkins | Aug 29, 2019
Single keyword ad groups, or SKAGs, have been affected with Google Ads’ match type changes. While SKAGs worked for some situations for a long time to control certain aspects of a PPC campaign, that is no longer an option. Instead, you may want to consider using single-themed ad groups, or STAGs, to capture the controlling intent of SKAGs in this new era. A STAG allows for the ability to set budgets aligned with profit as opposed to PPC mechanics.
Data-Driven Decision Making: How Good is Your Marketing Org at It? Without Experiments, You Will Never Know
By Tom Affinito | Aug 29, 2019
Tom Affinito shows us how marketing experiments are the key to helping organizations validate and calibrate data-driven decision making. He argues that “data-driven decision making should not be taken for granted…it needs to be constantly tested and tuned via ongoing experiments.” Affinito makes a strong argument for applying the Scientific Method for approaching how you test your marketing experiments and sharing the results across the entire organization.
3 Trends from Prime Day 2019 to guide your Black Friday and Cyber Monday Amazon strategy
By Andrew Waber | Aug 29, 2019
Using Prime Day 2019 sales activity across his client base of thousands of Amazon sellers, Andrew Waber shares 3 trends you can capitalize on for Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year. Waber states that “The results showed that the biggest trends to watch are the increase in volume not matching cost-per-click increases, product discounting not being a barrier to revenue growth and the impact of organic sales.”
Google Research: 55% of Consumers Use Videos for Purchase Decisions
By Roger Montti | Aug 30, 2019
Google’s research shows that 55% of consumers used videos during their shopping research to make purchase decisions. Online videos influence consumers by using videos as a shopping list, boosting confidence and feeling informed, and trusting video reviews of products. Google recommends using YouTube and YouTube influencers to help marketers with their video advertising. Montti stresses that authenticity is key to a YouTube product review.
What Google Trends Teaches Us About When to Trust Data
By Chris Lewis | Aug 30, 2019
Chris Lewis helps us understand how to extract honest data from Google Trends. While Google Trends offers an authoritative and immense amount of customizable data, you need to be able to interpret the data correctly. He recommends:
- Don’t Compare Apples to Oranges – make sure your y-axis is comparing the same thing by using the Compare feature.
- Stay Transparent – give a full context to your data, and say why some things are included and others aren’t.
- Understand the Sample You Are Working With
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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