PPC Roundup (Week 31)

This week's PPC news is a more concise and to-the-point update from official sources. It aims to make it easier for you to collaborate with your team or clients, and hopefully, It'd be a great way for you to be up-to-date on the latest news! 🔊

For those who'd like to hear more experts' advice, we will share a new article to gather all the great content each Wednesday.

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PPC Roundup

3rd to 10th of August 2022

Analytics

Google Analytics 4

Himanshu Sharma explains that a Close Funnel in GA4 is when all users have entered the funnel at the required first step/stage. You make it an Open Funnel as below.

📊 Markus Baersch shared how you can create a GA4 roll-up property with a server-side GTM (approved by Simo Ahava).

A good reminder from Shraddha Prajapati about the significance of the color we see on Google Tag Assistant.

Paid Search

Google Ads

Petya Yildizgoren tested to ease her targets, and found out that there's a consumer behavior shift whenever your ads are at the top position, resulting to better performances.

We should not assume that the current target is correct. Positions still matter, as well as change in business and seasonality.

A similar reminder from Bob Meijer is to consider our targets with prudence. These goals may not be relevant for the business anymore. If the environment has probably changed too much, you may need more information before deciding what will work the best now.

Anu Adegbola shared a quick tip to dismiss Google Ads recommendations faster.

The Optiscore recommendations are now more accessible than ever!

You'll find them even in the Google Documentation (e.g., Adjust Ad group Bids), even sending users directly into the related recommendations in Google Ads.

(credit: Shaquira Jeyasingh)

Performance Max

Anu Adegbola shared Ed Leake "wayward idea" to create a dedicated Generic PMax account with Brand negatives at the account level.

Tony Zara shared that the biggest issue we are seeing with PMax audits is broken ecomm_prodid. This is the parameter Google uses to fire retargeting ads across all properties. It's easy to miss, but it's critical. Pmax doesn't work properly without it.

Duane Brown shared that It looks like Google is taking over their sales channel from Shopify. SSC will be upgraded to PMax in early September, and new app installs as of August 15th will have PMax campaigns.

Amazon Ads

Adam Mellott shared how they were forced to pull back budget for a particular product that’s ranked highly across multiple keywords. By taking top-converting keywords out of this campaign and organizing into single-keyword campaigns, they were able to make more meaningful adjustments, evaluate performance more efficiently, and reallocate budget to what we know is performing well.

Paid Social

Meta Ads

A nice update from Bram Van der Hallen on the latest Meta Ads updates:

And his thoughts about the new Advantage+ Shopping campaigns

Julien de Ménonville shared how the 4:5 format is becoming the norm, with some creatives being automatically updated to this format through an addition of titles and descriptions.

Angelos Perlegkas explained how the new Business Settings show, as "inactive", the users who didn't change the account within the last 90 days. Useful for safety control!

LinkedIn Ads

Justin Rowe explained how segmenting by company size can improve your performances. Worth checking!

TikTok Ads

Jonathan Snow, DMD explained how a Beta feature in TikTok Ads allows you to target people based on their purchase intention, quite similar to Shopify Audiences.

Webinars

I was mindblowed when Cory Lindholm 💎 𝑷𝒂𝒊𝒅 𝑺𝒆𝒂𝒓𝒄𝒉 𝑬𝒙𝒑𝒆𝒓𝒕 discovered that it is possible to adapt an existing PMax for Retail campaign by removing its assets, and It works like Smart Shopping!

The current state of bid strategies from Jason Rothman

TikTok Ads Attribution Manager from Michelle Morgan

Marketing Industry

Andrew Lipsman explained how any evidence of a permanent e-commerce acceleration is concentrated in one category: 𝐠𝐫𝐨𝐜𝐞𝐫𝐲.  

(1) There was an influx of new grocery e-commerce buyers, with many likely to stick with it in some capacity going forward

(2) Existing online grocery buyers had an opportunity for stronger habit formation around an otherwise low-frequency behavior in a high-frequency category

Thought of the week

Most of us have been there before - sitting in meetings, wondering if we're ever going to get any real work done. Amalia Fowler shared good advice to check on your team's availability.

I'll add It is important to check only those who are needed at the meeting are present. Then, the team can communicate the most important information to everyone by sharing briefs or videos. These short briefs will always be available when they need them!

The PPC News project is a collaborative effort to help everyone contribute their knowledge or skillet, so they're recognized for it! With this weekly roundup in paid advertising, you can now spend less time wondering what's happening, and more of it on your own accounts.

We hope you enjoy this content 😊 We’re always looking for ways to improve #ppcnews, and we’d love your feedback. Please let us know if there are any other ways we could help better, and if you'd like to join, feel free to PM me!