On March 16th 2016 PPC Hero held a day long live summit on PPC. The summit featured 7 sessions from the writers behind PPC Hero. I attended the summit and thoroughly enjoyed the event and found it to be an informative source of strategies I can directly implement on the campaigns I manage to improve their performance.
Each of the sessions contained valuable information from knowledgeable writers and I encourage you to listen to the entire summit for yourself on their website: HERE. but I found 3 of the sessions stood out to me as the most immediately useful and I’ve summarized them briefly for you below. If you don’t have time to listen to every session from the summit definitely find time for these 3!
Building a Solid Foundation for Your PPC
Matt Umbro and Jacob Brown, both Senior Account Managers at PPC Hero led this session and basically summarized how to set up a PPC account for best long-term performance. They explain how to structure an account and choose your initial keyword targets in such a way that the account will function effectively and stay organized even as it matures and grows. If you’re brand-new to PPC this is a great session to get you you started in understanding the very basic structure of an account. I personally enjoyed their breakdown of how to choose keyword targets with a focus on ‘user-intent’, something I find is often overlooked when businesses are selecting their keyword targets. They also do a great job of summarizing the industry ‘jargon’ for beginners: ROAS, CPL etc. and of describing the relationship between PPC campaign options including: Shopping Campaigns, Mobile Campaigns, Bing Campaigns, Remarketing Campaigns and many other components that could seem confusing to a beginner PPC strategist.
Advanced Account Analysis and Optimizations
Carrie Albright and Jacob Fairclough led this session on advanced account analysis and optimizations, but they did it in such an approachable way that you weren’t even aware the techniques were fairly-advanced which I hugely appreciated. Often, when I’m scouting out PPC mentors and strategists to learn from I find it can be difficult to follow along if you’re not sharp with acronyms and industry jargon. Carrie and Jacob, for the most part didn’t look to baffle the audience with their brilliance but rather wanted to make their recommendations as translatable as possible. To summarize, they broke their presentation down into three main components:
- Benchmarking Past Performance: Use the historical data in your account to shape your present and future optimizations.
- Competitive Metrics: Analyze your competitors performance to learn from their strategies.
- Google Analytics: Use Google Analytics parallel to your advertising efforts. The fact that they put a spotlight on Google Analytics really did it for me as I find there is so much crucial data in Analytics that sometimes isn’t tapped into because it’s outside of the immediate advertising platforms (Adwords, Facebook, Bing Ads etc.).
Mastering PPC & It’s Impact on Your Overall Marketing Strategy
Diane Anselmo and Jeff Baum headed up this session which I thought was one of the most valuable because of it’s higher-level discussion of the ‘value’ of paid advertising. It includes intelligent strategies like navigating YouTube as a primary source for advertising since it’s the second largest search engine in the world (although technically owned by Google). They discuss YouTube remarketing, the power of storytelling through advertising and how to set healthy expectations with your client in light of the advertising platform you’re using (Facebook expectations, vs. Youtube expectations). They give a solid introduction to the ‘dynamic’ search tools you can use through Google Adwords but perhaps most applicably they explain some of their strategies for ‘Advanced Bidding’ which I personally found to be the most immediately applicable, however, mostly on my larger client accounts.
And there you have my top 3 sessions from PPC Hero’s Live Summit! I definitely recommend you check out their recordings and slide-shows and of course, if there’s any part of it you need help understanding and applying to your account please contact me directly through the form below.