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.
PPC Divination: Forecasting Uncertainty in Excel
By Emma Franks | Dec 18, 2018
Emma Franks provides a foundation for incorporating uncertainty into your PPC forecasting models. Predicting future performance base on historical performance alone doesn’t always provide for an accurate forecast, given how performance can be affected by new platform features, shifting competitive landscapes, changes in user behavior, and rising prices. She demonstrates how a couple statistical applications with uncertainty variables (to account for anticipated fluctuations in impression availability, CPCs, conversion rates, and aggressiveness of competitors) can help you build out better forecasts.
Remarketing tactics can mitigate post-holiday waste, here’s how
By Megan Taggart | Dec 18, 2018
Ready to explore a few tactics to recycle audiences from your holiday search ad spend for future re-marketing success? Megan Taggart shares her strategies for blocking remarketing audiences into smart segments to isolate that traffic to avoid over-reinvestment post-holiday, or creating lookalike audiences off them. She suggests upcycling that valuable holiday traffic for other gift-centric holidays later in the year, as well as nurturing the one time buyers into loyalists with email or interest campaigns.
5 Steps to Take When PPC Conversions Are Down
By Tim Jensen | Dec 18, 2018
Tim Jensen shares five steps you can take to diagnose issues, look for broader context, and communicate with your client when your PPC campaigns are not performing well. You should begin by comparing your data between various platforms to see if the drop in conversions is with tracking configuration for a specific platform or is a broader conversions problem. If you are having tracking issues, you may consider using these Chrome extensions to help straighten tracking issues out: Google Tag Assistant, Facebook Pixel Helper, and Bing UET Tag Helper. He recommends looking at longer time frames for trends to determine if you’ve been experiencing a drop over the last several weeks or months because taking drastic measures in an account may do more harm than good if a dip in performance has only happened over the last day or two. Sometimes the issue isn’t a PPC problem and is related to negative PR surrounding the brand or lack of brand awareness in general. Whatever the issues are, you should strive to be proactive and fix issues within your control to deliver for your client.
The Pros & Cons of Every Automated Bidding Strategy in Google
By Michelle Morgan | Dec 19, 2018
Michelle Morgan delivers an excellent guide to all the pros and cons to automated bidding in Google. She clearly walks you through every stage and strategy for every level of automated bidding, when you need to do it and when you should avoid it. She covers:
- Manual Bidding
- Enhanced CPC
- Maximize Conversions
- Target CPA
- Target ROAS
- Maximize Clicks
- Target Impression Share
- Target Search Page Location
- Target Outranking Share
- Cost per Thousand Viewable Impressions (vCPM)
3 prospecting features for Google Display campaigns
By: Ginny Marvin | Dec 19, 2018
Each of the new features Google will be using for Google Display campaigns are powered at some level by machine learning, bringing more automation to the way Display campaigns target prospective customers. The features include dynamic prospecting with product feeds, fine-tuned audience expansion, and auto-generated custom intent segments.
How to Earn a Google Ads Certification
By Corey Morris | Dec 19, 2018
Thinking about getting your Google Ads certification? The certification is an important credential for marketers and most entry-level search marketing roles for agencies and corporations require it. Learn everything you need to know about the process of earning your Google Ads certification.
Useful changes to your Share of Voice columns
By Nahva Tecklu | Dec 19, 2018
The new AI-powered features Bing Ads has rolled out over the past few months to the Competition Tab is meant to evolve your experience in performance reporting and enhance the overview of impression share metrics. As a response, they are removing the columns in your Share of Voice reports that are no longer needed. Nahva Tecklu reports, “Starting in March, the columns that show Impression share lost to ad relevance, Impression share lost to expected CTR and Impression share lost to bid will be removed from your Share of Voice reports. The columns that will remain are Impression share, Impression share lost to budget and Impression share lost to rank.”
Maximizing Sales Volume Beyond the Holidays
By Charlotte Haab | Dec 19th, 2018
Learn how it’s possible to extend your Black Friday and Cyber Monday momentum and maximize your sales well into the New Year. Use your first-party data from the holiday season to create segments to remarket down the line, or even create similar audiences or lookalikes on certain platforms going into the New Year. You may want to consider adding New Year’s Resolutions to your vertical and expand on keywords, inventory, and seasonal deals that apply. Also, setting up a Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) campaign in Google will allow you to target broader categories based on your site structure or product categorization to ensure you cover all over your keyword bases.
The Top 10 Google Ads Innovations of 2018
By Lyle Swartz | Dec 20, 2018
Google Ads saw massive changes and innovations in 2018, it was hard to keep up! Lyle Swartz puts together a list of the top 10 Google Ads Innovations for the year that significantly impacted the world of digital marketing. Rounding out the list:
- Video shopping ads
- TrueView For Reach
- Smart Goals
- Ad Position Metrics Beyond “Average Position”
- Google Ads New Interface
- Parallel Tracking
- Changes to Exact Match
- Expanded Text Ads Update
- Promotion Extensions
- Responsive Search Ads
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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