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.
4 Key GDN Settings to Check for Smarter Ad
SpendPauline Jakober | Dec 11, 2018
Pauline Jakober highlights four areas advertisers should be monitoring closely that will keep their ad spend in check while using the Google Display Network (GDN). Automated targeting, with “conservative” as the setting, can still be showing your ads to the wrong audience. By continually auditing your account, you can change the settings to “no automated targeting” to make sure you’re not spending more for clicks to the wrong audience. For location targeting, you may want to keep your settings narrower and change it to just “people in my location.” If you’re selling a high-ticket or enterprise level product, you may want to remove mobile devices from your GDN because those purchases rarely happen by mobile, and mobile devices carry a high “accidental click” rate. Lastly, you may want to consider setting content and site exclusions, which can be easily done at the account level.
10 Facebook Ads Mistakes You Never Have to Make Again
By Pam Neely | Dec 11, 2018
A recent report by Buffer and Social Media Week found that 94% of marketers are using Facebook Ads, which is more than content marketing, email marketing, and SEO. Interestingly, only 17% of marketers found their social media advertising to be very effective. Just in case you’re not part of that 17%, Pam Neely shares 10 Facebook Ads mistakes that you can learn from and correct in your campaigns.
Google to Roll Out New Call-to-Action Extension for Video Ads
By Matt Southern | Dec 12, 2018
Google Ads will be replacing the YouTube CTA overlay in January 2019 with a new CTA extension in its place. This new CTA extension for video ads will be for TrueView in-stream and video discovery ads, and eventually to Bumper ads. The extension can be used for advertisers that want to drive awareness or consideration, rather than clicks and conversions.
Facebook Search Ads are Now Available to Select Businesses in North America
By Matt Southern | Dec 12, 2018
Facebook is now offering an ad product that competes with Google’s search ads–Facebook is now testing ads in search results. They are testing search ads being displayed to users in the US and Canada, and in the automotive, retail, and e-commerce industries.
5 Ways to Optimize PPC Advertising to Improve the Customer Experience
By Chaitanya Chandrasekar | Dec 12, 2018
Chaitanya Chandrasekar states that, “According to a recent study, nearly 70 percent of consumers maintain they don’t trust advertising. Another 42 percent say they distrust brands – and for a good reason…To avoid this common pitfall, businesses that want to develop a relevant, sustainable and scalable advertising strategy need to prioritize customer experience above all else.” To achieve that goal, Chandrasekar gives advice improving the following areas:
- Take full advantage of targeting opportunities
- Offer understanding & emotional appeal
- Deliver exactly what they’re looking for
- Improve sitewide user experience
- Offer value when people need it most
How to Optimize B2B PPC Landing Pages
By Adam Proehl | Dec 12, 2018
Adam Proehl shares excellent advice for optimizing your B2B landing pages for conversion. He explains what makes a great download, worthy of an email address, and when and why it should be gated versus given away for free. Proehl also takes the struggle out of properly optimizing for “Sales Inquiry” objectives and how to gain a commitment to be in front of the prospect again. He also explains what your “engaged visitor” goals should be and how to achieve them, as well as provides a checklist you can use to get the most out of your landing pages.
Ad Extensions: To Automate or Not to Automate?
By Navah Hopkins | Dec 12, 2018
Google knows the value that extensions bring to advertisers and will sometimes add in extensions on your behalf. While some extensions are easy for Google, others require more control. Navah Hopkins gives a guide to understanding when it’s okay to let Google do it’s thing, and when you need to step in with strategic messaging. She covers how to handle:
- Sitelinks
- Callouts
- Structured Snippets
- Call Extensions
- Message Extensions
- Location extensions
- Promotion Extensions
- Price Extensions
A Bing Ads Script for Maintaining Monthly Account Budgets
By Frederick Vallaeys | Dec 13, 2018
Frederick Vallaeys shares a new script that you can copy-and-paste into your Bing Ads MCC account to keep managed accounts under a maximum monthly budget. The script includes example code for workarounds to send emails and label things that the script changed so you can grab that code and reuse it in your own scripts. “By running the script daily, it can detect if a predetermined level of spend has been reached and then pause all currently active campaigns. When it detects that the target spend has been reached, the script sends an email and stores the paused campaigns in a public data store. When the script runs at the start of a new month, it uses that data store to see what campaigns it previously paused so it can turn these back on.”
Utilizing Site Search Data to Improve Your Awareness Campaigns
By Joe Martinez | Dec 13, 2018
Your site search set up in your Google Analytics can give you data on what your current visitors are looking for when they are on your site. So why not use that data to expand your reach to new users in creative ways in your awareness campaigns? Joe Martinez walks us through how to use site search terms to test new custom intent audiences and how to create remarketing audiences.
Google adds pay for conversions bidding in Display campaigns
By Ginny Marvin | Dec 14, 2018
Google has mad conversion-based bidding for display campaigns called “Pay for conversions” now available with the goal being to generate as many conversions as possible at your target threshold. The new bidding options make it so that advertisers are charged when users convert from the ads, rather than for ad clicks or impressions.
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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