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.
Wave Bye Bye to These Digital Marketing Trends: Pubcon Speakers Speak Out
By Mark Traphagen

The speakers at Pubcon Pro Las Vegas were asked, “what current digital marketing strategy or practice we do now do you see going away in the next year or so?” They share their predictions for:
1. Keyword Dependency
2. AMP
3. Local Search Changes
4. Organic Social Media
Google Ads now showing cart metrics for Shopping campaigns
By Ginny Marvin | Oct 21, 2019

Google Ads Shopping campaigns are now showing e-commerce cart data in the UI. Merchants can see average cart size, cost of goods sold, gross profit and more. The new changes are for merchants to gain a clearer sense of which products are driving profitable cart transactions. Merchants can see when products that get clicks lead to sales of other products – this kind of insight could show that seemingly less productive products are driving sales of your top sellers.
Conditional ads – customized ads made easy
By Martin Röttgerding | Oct 23, 2019

Martin Röttgerding shares his new approach to customized ads. He combines the benefits of feed-based customization with the simplicity of IF functions. This way, ad customization becomes much more accessible. A conditional ad is a dedicated ad that can only be shown if its condition is met. He demonstrates how to create your own IF conditions for time-based conditional ads.
Navigating the Holiday Season: The 2019 Checklist for Success on Amazon
By Carolyn Ward | Oct 25, 2019

Are your accounts ready for the holiday season on Amazon? This year’s Amazon Prime Day was bigger than 2018’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday’s sales combined, and this year’s holiday season is projected to be big as well. Merkle shares best practices to ensure your Amazon accounts are set up for success this holiday season, for pre-, peak-, and post-holiday events.
4 Insider Search Tips to Influence Holiday Shoppers
By Holly Bullock | Oct 25, 2019

Holly Bullock shares helpful insights from Microsoft Advertising data to help you reach and influence online searchers, along with some planning pointers along the way. Her recommendations include:
1. Start Engaging NOW
2. Ramp up in November for Black Friday & Cyber Monday
3. Build on the Momentum in December
4. Keep It Going Past Christmas & New Year’s
How to Diversify Your Marketing Traffic Sources and Why You Should
By Jessica Thiefles | Oct 25, 2019

You want to diversify your website traffic sources so you can drive more traffic, set yourself up for long-term success, and capture as many potential customers and leads as possible. You don’t want to depend too heavily on search engines like Google in case an update or penalty crashes your organic traffic. Therefore, it’s good to diversify your traffic sources. Jessica Thiefles urges you to look past Google and social media as traffic sources and consider:
- Investing in multimedia – using video, audio, and text
- Going digital with print
- Guest posting
Mastering Negative Keywords: Not All Paid Search Clicks Are Valuable
By Joe Bernal | Oct 25, 2019

Joe Bernal explains a tactic he calls “negative keyword funneling” that forces the search engines to match ads the way he wants them to be matched. The right way to treat match types is as targeting variables. It’s just as important to block irrelevant traffic as it is to bring in relevant traffic. By adding exact match negative keywords across non-exact match campaigns/ad groups, you can force the search engine to force the exact match queries to match to your exact match keywords versus matching them to phrase or broad match.
Responsive Display Ads to Replace Legacy Display Ads: Here’s What It Means
By Gordon Donnelly | Oct 28, 2019

Responsive display ads are replacing legacy display ads in your Google Display Network (GDN) campaigns. This includes Smart display ads and Legacy dynamic responsive template (Template ID: 491). Starting in November 2019, responsive display ads will replace legacy display ads in Google ads. Advertisers should take this opportunity to make sure visual and textual assets, including images and business names, are up-to-date, as well as adding additional images, headlines, descriptions, and logos.
4 Instagram Marketing Tips to Boost Your Reach & Conversions
By Mansi Dhorda | Oct 28, 2019

Instagram has become a large platform for advertisers, and the competition to stand out is fierce. Mansi Dhorda shares her top tips to create a successful content plan for Instagram:
1. Plan Your Content Feed in Advance
2. Use Relevant Hashtags
3. Post at the Right Time
4. Measure the Results
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.