Happy Friday friends and welcome to this week’s edition of the Clix Marketing Blog’s PPC News and Views! This week, like most weeks, was another great one for PPC content from around the interwebs. Excel, seasonal campaigns, and Google’s updated Ad Rank are our main topics for the day. Check it out!
From the Experts
PPC Hero
We’re starting off strong this week. PPC Hero’s Jacob Fairclough had a really great post this week designed to help you Find New Opportunities and Lower Your CPA with a Simple Heat Map in Excel. Say what?! Yeah. It’s awesome. Seriously, if you’re wanting to look for areas of strength or weakness in your CPA, or wanting to know a great way to find bid multipliers for your account, this is the post for you.
Beyond the Paid
Let’s stay with Excel and pivot tables for just a minute. Why? Because pivot tables are freaking awesome, duh! Don’t believe me? PPC Moses Melissa Mackey just put together a great round up of her Top 5 Ways to Use Pivot Tables for PPC. And that’s where this blurb stops. If you don’t believe Mel, you’re lost. Have fun crossing the Red Sea of ppc account management by yourself.
RKG Blog
Tis the season indeed. Well, tis the season to work on your seasonal campaigns and Emily Kirk is here to help you out. She’s got 12 Ways to Enhance Your 2013 Holiday Paid Search Program written up and placed on the internet all nice and neat for you. In it she makes mention of mobile best practices, cross device conversions, PLAs, remarketing and so many more things that you should get in order now so your holidays can be merry and bright rather than banging out campaign optimizations on Christmas Eve. (P.S. By Christmas Eve, you’re already too late. Sorry dude.) Give the post a read and make sure you’re prepared for this holiday season.
Wordstream
This week Google announced a new version of their Ad Rank formula used for determining ad position. And just like our industry does, we then like to speculate as to Google’s true motives and come up with our own theories behind their madness. Well Erin Sagan at Wordstream did just that and you need to read her article. In her post What the New AdWords Ad Rank Algorithm Really Means, Erin provides three of her own theories, then retraces previous actions by Google, then provides some insights into what this change means for your accounts.
From the Engines
Inside AdWords
Google had a couple big updates this week.
Introducing Shopping Campaigns: a Better Way to Promote Your Products on Google
PLAs have become all the rage in PPC over the past few months, and let’s be honest, they can really bring in the revenue when done right. The problem is doing them right. Google’s announcement of shopping campaigns is designed to help you better manage your PLAs and get better performance out of them. These new campaigns promise easier campaign set up and management, improved reporting features, and insights into competitive data.
Improving Ad Rank to Show More Relevant Ad Extensions and Formats
As references in the Wordstream article above, Google has announced a new version of their Ad Rank formula. The gist: you should start using ad extensions in all of your campaigns.
Bing Ads
This week, Bing re-stated their intent to require users to create a Microsoft account to log into their Bing Ads accounts. Only problem, it didn’t go so hot. Many advertisers who selected to be reminded later, were simply prevented from accessing their account. Ouch! Ginny Marvin pointed out some grievances in her Search Engine Land post: Roll-Out of Bing Ads’ Microsoft Account Requirement Ruffles Feathers. Anyway, just be aware that if you’re advertising in Bing, you’ll need to create a new Microsoft log in to access your ads in the future.
That brings us to the end of today’s round up. I know, I know. It’s extremely sad. But hey, good news! We’ll be right back here next Friday with more goodness from around the PPC industry. See you then!
