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.
Google Adds New Features to Responsive Search Ads
By Susan Wenograd | Jul 15, 2020
Google has announced new features to responsive search ads (RSA) in terms of ad copy options with dynamic features: location insertion and countdown customizers. The new features will increase its helpfulness with cross-campaign results and asset suggestions. The location extension insertion feature allows the advertiser to insert a placeholder telling Google to display the City, State or Country based on where the potential customer is searching from, or where they’re interested in. The countdown time specification feature can be adjusted to the timezone of the searcher, or set at a global level to end without making any timezone adjustments. The system also populates a dropdown of suggested ad copy to test and offers cross-campaign reporting for these copy assets.
Is Targeting More Important than Reach for Marketers?
By Alex Rynne | Jul 15, 2020
“The more nitty gritty we get with targeting, the more difficult it becomes to scale for widespread reach. The more people we aim to reach, the more difficult it becomes to make any one person feel special. There’s a push-pull factor at work here,” writes Alex Rynne. She explains that B2B marketers have found that targeting and reach aren’t as binary as they once were, arguing to make quality targeting the first priority. Once you’re confident in your ability to engage the right person with the right message, only then does it make sense to see if you can expand the reach.
8 Year-to-Date Reports & Analyses You Should Be Running
By Andrea Taylor | Jul 15, 2020
Now that we are more than half a year into 2020, you should have plenty of data to run some Year-to-Date reports. Andrea Taylor assembles eight reports and analyses you should be running, including:
1. Long-term Search Query Analysis
2. User Location Reports
3. Competitor Analysis
4. Quality Score Analysis
5. Low Clickthrough Analysis
6. Display Ads Auto Placement Review
7. Day of the Week/Time of Day Reports
8. Extension Review
When Should You Use Google’s Conversion Action Sets?
By Suzanne Taylor | Jul 15, 2020
You can use conversion action sets to align each conversion type with its respective campaigns. Suzanne Taylor explains why you should use conversion tracking and how to use Google’s conversion action sets to optimize your campaigns better. When conversion tracking is implemented, you can see which keywords, ads, and campaigns are driving those conversions. This allows you to optimize your bids, ad text, and keywords accordingly, which improves your ROI over time. Conversion action sets allow you to group your primary conversion actions together across multiple accounts or at the campaign level rather than at the account level.
YouTube Custom Intent Targeting – One of Google’s Best Kept Targeting Secrets
By Matt Peterson | Jul 16, 2020
Advertisers can reach the same search audience (based on their actual searches), on YouTube, often at a fraction of the CPCs on Google. Custom Intent Audiences on Youtube uses keywords to create audiences based on actual previous searches for those keywords. You can re-use your search keyword set for YouTube Custom Intent Audience to make an audience based on your most expensive, least consistent converter terms, competitor’s terms, and high-volume informational queries.
How to Combine SEO & PPC Data for More Powerful Results
By Ben Wood | Jul 16, 2020
Building a deeper understanding of how both SEO and PPC can complement each other to deliver mutually beneficial performance is critical to success. By combining forces, you have an opportunity to share learnings, improve budget efficiency, and help drive mutual growth for the brands you’re managing. Ben Wood examines strategic data sharing across organic and paid search.
What Is Cost Per Click (CPC)? 9 Tried and Tested Ways to Optimize Your Advertising Campaigns
By Erika Varagouli | Jul 17, 2020
The CPC that you pay plays a huge part in your campaign’s profitability. In this guide, Erika Varagouli looks at proven methods of bringing down your CPC, including:
1. Improve Your Quality Score
2. Find and Bid On Long-Tail Keywords
3. Use Negative Keywords Effectively
4. Test Different Average Ad Positions
5. Use Ad Scheduling
6. Use Geo-Targeting
7. Use Different Keyword Match Types
8. Use Device Adjustments
9. Combat Rising Brand Terms
5 Things You Should Not Do When Working with PPC Managers:
By Danielle Strouther | Jul 17, 2020
PPC managers are able to bring a business leads, sales, and traffic from paid ads for the best budget. Therefore, it’s important to build a successful relationship with your PPC managers. To help you create a winning relationship, Danielle Strouther recommends these tips:
1. Don’t Keep Them in the Dark About Your Business
2. Don’t Shut Them Into a Google Box
3. Don’t Be a Needy Client
4. Don’t Expect 100% Success Every Time
5. Don’t Expect Them to Be Okay During the Pandemic
Microsoft Advertising Knows: Speed Matters
By Sabina Warren | Jul 17, 2020
Some of your purchased clicks might never turn into real traffic as impatient users click back on their browsers, because speed matters! Microsoft Advertising is focused on setting parallel tracking as the default, which would allow the consumer to be taken directly to your final URL while all the click-measurement processing is done in the background. Microsoft Advertising announced that parallel tracking will be mandatory for all accounts created after May 31, 2020, and for accounts created before that, it will be mandatory after Nov 15, 2020.
How Content Can Drive Marketing Success in Lean Times: 5 Tips
By Mansi Dhorda | Jul 17, 2020
Content marketing will play a crucial role during our economic downturn in your attempts to get some traction going. Right now leads to an opportunity to build a well-established content funnel that will position you to leverage the advantage of a more receptive target audience. To make the most of content to drive your marketing activities when things aren’t moving in the right direction, Mansi Dhorda recommends:
1. Conduct a Content Audit
2. The Video Route
3. Extensively Researched Content Assets
4. Create Content Extremely Relevant for the Times
5. Keep Producing Content
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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