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.
5 Ways a Content Marketing Mission Statement Can Improve Your Strategy
By Céillie Clark-Keane | Feb 11, 2020

Does your marketing team have a formal content marketing mission statement? “It defines the objectives and the scope of content in order to let readers or viewers know what they can expect,” writes Céillie Clark-Keane. She explains why a content marketing mission statement is important and covers five ways it will improve your overall marketing content strategy, including:
1. Anchor content across platforms and mediums to a common goal
2. Strengthen your cohesive, recognizable brand identity
3. Determine what topics aren’t worth pursuing
4. Align your content marketing with your company’s goals
5. Hold your content marketing accountable to those goals
Google Ads Makes it Easier to Review a Campaign’s Change History
By Matt Southern | Feb 12, 2020

Google Ads will make it easier to determine how campaign changes impact ad performance by allowing advertisers to view campaign changes annotated in their performance charts. Now, with the data shown on one screen, advertisers can better understand the impact of specific changes on their campaign performance. A new “See Explanations” button now appears whenever there’s a significant change in performance from one period of time to another. Google Ads will provide the most likely reasons behind why the changes occurred for changes in impressions, clicks, and cost.
Utilizing Organic Search to Expand PPC Coverage
By Mike Matta | Feb 13, 2020

Organic search and PPC complement each other, and you can use data from organic to enhance your PPC strategy. “When you download or sort your organic data by clicks, you’re finding areas that you are likely already performing strongly in. Think of these keywords as opportunities to complement a strong ranking. This gives users double the opportunity to click to your website. On competitive non-brand terms, this extra traffic can be invaluable in converting additional people…If you sort by impressions, your goal should be to uncover underrepresented keywords. Here you can supplement your average or poor organic ranking with an ad in the paid search results.,” writes Mike Matta.
Putting Identity at The Center of Your Customer Strategy
By Matt Austin | Feb 14, 2020

Establishing a comprehensive identity strategy to support personalization will drive better experiences while improving marketing effectiveness. “Identity is the foundation for personalization and is the core differentiator you’ll need to deliver the total customer experience,” writes Matt Austin. He explains where the starting point to identity-centric strategy begins and how to build your customer’s profile from first-party data.
Diversifying Your Digital Marketing: 5 Strategic Areas to Focus on
By Lee Wilson | Feb 17, 2020

Lee Wilson shares five of the most useful marketing approaches to enrich your own strategic plans and increase your robustness to changing external competition. They include:
1. Proximity Marketing & Beacons
2. Conversational Commerce & Chatbots
3. Voice Search Optimization (VSO)
4. Integrating User-Led Design
5. Increasing the Practical Value from Your Data
The state of tracking and data privacy in 2020
By Andrew Garberson | Feb 14, 2020

Andrew Garberson provides “the state of affairs in our industry, an assessment of where search marketers find themselves in the current entanglement of data and privacy and where we can expect it to go from here.” He gives a brief technical history of web tracking, compares first- and third-party cookies, and where we are currently at with GDPR and CCPA.
How to Use Creative Sets to Make the Most of Your Apple Search Ads
By Lina Danilchik | Feb 14, 2020

You can run mobile A/B testing experiments in Apple Search Ads with the help of Creative Sets. “Since Creative Sets enable publishers to align screenshots & app previews with ad group keyword themes and audience segments (gender, age, location), you can test various combinations of screenshots, track their performance and find out what variations work best,” explains Lina Danilchik. By running ads with custom ad variations that validated their efficiency during Creative Sets testing, you can improve the performance of your app’s ads in search results and consequently increase the tap-through rate (TTR) and the download rate. High TTR, in turn, will help you win more auctions, which will lead to more downloads.
Google Partners clarifies why clients may be listed as ‘eligible users’ toward new certification requirement
By Ginny Marvin | Feb 16, 2020

The Google Partners program eligibility requirements that at least 50% of the eligible users listed in their manager accounts will need to earn Google Ads certifications (up from just one certified user with standard or admin access) will take effect by the end of June. The issue is that not everyone listed as an eligible user on the account has anything to do with the campaigns. Ginny Marvin reviews some key points of clarification as to who is considered eligible and how to change it.
The 5 Essential Digital Marketing Skills You Need (& How to Get Them!)
By Kristen McCormick | Feb 17, 2020

Digital marketing is communication, or dialog, with your customers over electronic platforms. Kristen McCormick covers five digital marketing skills that are crucial for success in today’s landscape, including:
1. Copywriting
2. SEO
3. PPC
4. Email
5. Conversion rate optimization
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.