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.

TrueView for Shopping: The perfect marriage of awareness and direct response

By Joe Martinez | Nov 26, 2018

TrueView for Shopping allows advertisers to showcase their products during a video ad and after the ad has been seen or skipped, providing an opportunity for brand awareness and direct response at any level of the buyer’s funnel. However, a large concern for clients is a lack of video content or not enough budget to cover video production. But there is a workaround for this issue: create campaigns that consistently reach new users and showcases different products by creating custom filters that use your custom labels. Combine custom labels with audience exclusion, and you’ll be avoiding people who may have recently interacted with the brand and serving ads to new, relevant audiences. Using this strategy, any PPC campaign on a low-budget e-commerce account can succeed with a video ad!

Google Ads’ Ad Preview Tool Gets Two New Features

Robert Brady | Nov 26, 2018

Google Ads has recently added some new features to their Ad Preview and Diagnosis Tool. You can now see if specific audiences are seeing your ads, including remarketing lists, similar audiences, and combination audiences. You can now also make edits directly in the tool for raising budgets, but hopefully, this feature will be expanded to edit more options in the future.

How to Balance Search Ad Best Practices & Machine Learning Innovation

By Ilya Cherepakhin | Nov 26, 2018

Amid all the ads options you have to choose from, how do you construct a scalable strategy that supports broader targeting and testing objectives? Being able to accurately determine why an ad’s performance ended up the way it did, will require scalable solutions with scalable tool adoption. Your tools need to provide full visibility into results, down to the conversion level for each ad. You may consider testing your Responsive Search Ads– while they are seeing lower impression share than other ads, their CVR and ROI is far exceeding Expanded Text Ads. You may want to rethink your ad messaging SEM strategy with some Responsive Search Ad best practices.

3 Easy Steps to Find Your Audience on Quora Ads

By Joe Martinez | Nov 27, 2018

Advertising on Quora Ads gives advertisers the perfect opportunity to find a highly relevant group of people who are actively researching questions about products or services they are selling. Joe Martinez walks you through 3 easy steps to getting started and for finding your audience on Quora Ads.

Google Ads Can Now Count Calls from Location Extensions as Conversions

By Matt Southern | Nov 27, 2018

Google announced that calls from Google Ads location extensions can now be counted as conversions, so long as account-level call reporting is enabled. Calls will be counted as a conversion after 60 seconds by default, but users will have the option to change the default setting to any length of time, in accordance with business goals.

A Remarketing-Free PPC Strategy

By Alaina Thompson | Nov 28, 2018

If you had to remove remarketing from your PPC strategy, would you be able to? Following GDPR, marketers in the EU have had to rethink their remarketing strategies. And if you’re not affected by GDPR now, could future legislation be adopted in the US, and if so, could you adapt? Alaina Thompson shares a few strategies to alter current remarketing campaigns that work within the GDPR framework by remapping your PPC funnel and altering measurements.

Predict the consumer decision journey with linguistics

By Kelli Kemery | Nov 29, 2018

The Bing Ads research team has joined with the Intent Lab Opens to facilitate personalized marketing. The Intent Lab aims to provide an understanding of online consumer behavior and their decision-making processes, as well as identifying ways to strengthen brand relevancy and engagement.

Target Impression Share Bidding: What We’ve Seen So Far

By Abby Woodcock | Nov 29, 2018

How has Google’s Target Impression Share performed in the last month? Clix Marketing ran a couple of tests and shares their results with us. The goal for Target Impression Share is to focus on increasing brand awareness by helping you better control how often your ad shows up in auctions. Their testing found that Target Impression Share bidding helped accomplish their specific goals of decreasing CPCs and CPLs when kept at a lower Target of 90%.

Quora unveils new Promoted Answers ad unit

By Robin Kurzer | Nov 30, 2018

Quora’s new native ad unit, Promoted Answers, is Quora’s first ad format that promotes organic content posted on the site by themselves or others. Brands can promote any answer they want, providing answers that showcase thought leadership with detailed information about your product or service that goes beyond normal ad copy and helps to increase engagement through upvotes, comments and follows.

6 Key Things Worth Analyzing in your Competitors’ PPC Strategies

By Daria Voronina | Nov 30, 2018

SEMrush released an update to what they consider the six most important things advertisers should be keeping tabs on their competitors to make the most of their research. They share strategies and pro tips in these categories:

• Competitor Keywords
• Ads: Analyze Seasonality and Tailor Your Campaign Around It
• Ad Copy: Revitalize Your Ads
• Mobile Usage
• Organic vs. Paid: Uncover Your Rivals’ Strategies
• CPC Estimation

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.