The Clix Marketing Blog’s Weekly #PPC News & Views: Aug 15, 2014

This Week in PPC News and ViewsWelcome to this week’s edition of the Clix Marketing Blog’s PPC News and Views!

From the Experts

Beyond the Paid

Tablets = Desktops, and Other Google Fibs: Melissa Mackey gives another great rant about how Google’s ideas don’t quite seem to match up with those of some of it’s most knowledgable advertisers. Check out what she has to say.

Search Engine Land

These 10 Analytics Reports Will Improve Your AdWords Results: Google Analytics is a powerful supplement to AdWords data. Check out Frederick Vallaeys’ ideas about maximizing it’s potential and improving your account.

PPC Hero

Why We Ignore Net Gains in PPC: Many PPC reports provide month over month or year over year data, but they ignore the actual net gains or loses of those time frames. See what Jeff is talking about and why you should maybe start including those stats.

iSpionage

6 Advanced Ways to Better Visualize PPC Data: Visualizing data can be a great way to get insights into your performance. Check out this post to get ideas on how to make your data visual from beginner to advanced levels.

RKGBlog

Video: 2014 Q2 Findings to Prepare You For The Holidays: Take advantage of RKG’s large customer base and see what they’re seeing in their data and how you can use that to leverage your holiday campaigns this year.

FBPPC

5 Great Ways to Use Website Custom Audiences: Facebook Custom Audiences are a great way to get in front of your customers. Here are some smart ways to use those lists effectively.

About This Close Variants Thing

Google announced this week they’ll be updating all advertisers using exact and phrase match keywords to close variants. Below is the official announcement as well as some opinion pieces by experts on the subject.

Google AdWords

Close variant matching for all exact and phrase keywords

Certified Knowledge

AdWords is Forcing Variation Match Upon You-This is Why it’s a Terrible Idea

WordStream

RIP Exact Match and Phrase Match in AdWords!

The SEM Post

All Exact & Phrase Match Keywords Turning Into Close Variant Keyword Matching

From the Engines

Google AdWords

New Shopping Campaigns Upgrade Tool: By the end of the month, all PLA campaigns in AdWords will be retired and Shopping campaigns will take over. To help ease the transition, Google has put together a new upgrade tool for us. If you haven’t upgraded yet, do it now!

Bing Ads

New Opportunities Page Makes Optimizing Simple and Speedy: You spoke, they listened. Bing Ads now has a fancy new Opportunities tab that allows you to look for improvements for your account and make those changes directly from the page. Check it out.