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 Analyze & Capitalize on Competitive PPC Analysis in the Age of AI

By Chandal Nolasco Da Silva | Nov 16, 2018

In a recap of Marcela De Vivo’s workshop at the Hero Conf London 2018 series, we learn valuable insights to paying close attention to competitor’s PPC campaigns. She makes a case for embracing AI driven data for repetitive, automated marketing tasks that free the advertiser to pour more of their time into creativity, innovation, and data analysis. She also provides insight into tools and strategies to best analyze your competitor’s campaigns and create better ads of your own.

Lexical Insights: Unlocking the Hidden Value in your SEM Program

By Dominik Suter | Nov 18, 2018

Take a dive into how the refined analytical framework in Lexical Insights can reveal hidden SEM values in your Word Analysis and Phrase Analysis when coupled with Sentiment Analysis. SEM ad performance can be significantly informed and improved when you are able to identify specific words and sentiments and to quantify their impact when creating better performing ads.

Answering 11 Hard-Hitting Questions About Organic and Paid Facebook: An Interview with Dennis Yu

By Garrett Holmes | Nov 19, 2018

DigitalMarketer sits down for an interview with Dennis Yu, Chief Technology Officer of BlitzMetrics, to talk about the current state of Facebook algorithms for organic and paid marketing. Dennis provides great insight into how the algorithms use both your organic and paid engagements data, he demystifies Boosting Posts, and he leads a great discussion on the use of video in your Facebook marketing. The interview is available on video and in a written article for your preference.

Help improve ad engagement with updates to Expanded Text Ads

By Joseph Damiani & +Parinita Rahi | Nov 19, 2018

Expanded Text Ads in the Bing Ads platform will now provide advertisers with more text space for creating longer ads. You now have the opportunity to stand out and increase engagement by:

• Adding an additional headline in your title (up to three)
• .Adding an additional description (up to two).
• Using up to 90 characters for each of the two descriptions.

Report: Google showing fewer video and image boxes in the search results

By Barry Schwartz | Nov 21, 2018

RankRanger and STAT Search Analytics are reporting a 20-30% drop in the time that video and images boxes are showing up in Google web and mobile search results. They noted video and image carousels or boxes drops began around November 13th and 14th. You may be finding that with less of these boxes showing up, your traffic that you leverage around vertical searches may be impacted.

Google Ads Brings Merchant Promotions to Shopping Actions

By MattGSouthern | Nov 21, 2018

Google Ads will now allow online retailers to add promotions to their Shopping Actions inventory with their Merchant Promotions program. Discounted products will show up for customers to view in Google Express. Google expects that this will make your offer more appealing while encouraging customers to make a purchase. Promotions that are allowed are:

• Percent-off discounts
• Promo codes
• Money off discounts
• Quantity discounts on the same item

12 Amazing PPC Competitor Campaigns

By Byron Tassoni-Resch | Nov 21, 2018

If you’re looking to create a competitor PPC campaign, you will need a slightly different approach than what you would typically use for your search engine ads. You may want to consider prioritizing your headline copy, leading with a unique selling point that you can solve over your competitor, and go ahead and be bold with your attention-grabbing. Take a look at these 12 strong PPC competitor campaigns for inspiration.

How evolving user patterns drive new ad experiences on YouTube

By Khushbu Rathi | Nov 21, 2018

Google will be changing the ad experience by adapting to three new trends they have noted in their user’s experience. To enhance a longer viewing experience, they will begin placing two ads stacked back to back at the beginning, where viewers can skip the ad if they are not interested. Because users also tend to utilize self-directed discovery during video search, Google is adding TrueView video discovery ads to the YouTube home feed, along with the Masthead and Universal App campaign ads. Lastly, in response to the increased watch time on TV screens, they have introduced the TV screen device type in Google Ads and Display & Video 360, allowing you to tailor your campaigns for connected TVs.

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.