In the podcast:

01:13 – Adwords Updates
01:18 – New Interface
02:28 – Promotions ad extension
03:30 – Retiring of review ad extension
04:12 – Customer match
05:08 – Facebook Updates
05:24 – Algorithm Update
06:23 – Power Editor to retire soon
07:25 – New Placement

Change is the only constant in the world of Pay Per Click marketing – so in this episode, I go through some of the latest updates and developments in the PPC industry. Some of these updates will help you stay ahead of your competition, so be sure to take notes!

I’m your host Ilana Wechsler and today I’m going to do things a little bit differently. I’m going to be talking about some of the latest PPC updates in the industry. So what’s the latest updates in the adwords world as well as Facebook ads. They are both a constantly changing space where I usually say to my clients and coaching students change is the only constant. So today’s episode we’re going to be covering some of the latest changes in the industry so that you can apply it to your business. So let’s get stuck right in.

Adwords Updates

1. New Interface

So let’s get started with AdWords. AdWords as I said is always changing. So they are in the process of rolling out their brand new interface. So you may have seen in your AdWords account a little blue box down the bottom right hand corner saying for a better user experience click to the new interface and Google have come out and said that they’re going to be retiring the old interface soon.

But much to the complaints of people like myself and others in the industry they’ve decided to hold off retiring the old interface just yet. And that’s because the new interface although looks vastly different.

It also doesn’t have all the features that the old interface does. So personally I am still using the old interface but slowly getting accustomed to the new one because I would say it’s imminent that the old one will be retiring soon and actually in my PPC academy training community we have videos in there of the new interface. So it’s something you need to be aware of and definitely get your head around it before you can’t use the old one.

2. Promotions ad extension

So they’ve also forcing people to use the new interface by having some features only in the new interface that is not in the old one. For example a ad extension called promotions.

So it’s a promotional ad extension which is like the other ad extensions that are available out there. This is just for promotions where you can say you know 20% off or whatever is your promotion but to actually create one of those ad extensions you have to do it through the new Adwords interface.

So I suspect more and more Google are going to be doing this they’re going to be releasing new features and opportunities for advertisers in the new interface and not supporting it into the old one. So these are all obviously incentivization tactics by Google to get us to switch over and slowly but surely they will be working. So that’s one thing that is new within Adwords and obviously the second part of that being that promotions ad extension.

3. Retiring of review ad extension

Continuing on with ad extensions is that they’re also going to be retiring the review ad extension. So you might have them running in your account or you’ve seen on some of your competitors in the Adwords ad it’s got a review extension where it’s shows a snippet of a review that somebody has left and they’re actually retiring this ad extension.

So much to the disappointment of some advertisers who are using this very successfully. They were notoriously hard to get approved but if you did manage to get it approved you were lucky. However your luck will be running out shortly. If not already so that’s a little bit disappointing for those of you who have been running it.

4. Customer match

Any other update within the adwords sphere is customer match. So customer match is not new. And that for those of you who don’t know, Facebook has long had the ability for you to upload your database to Facebook to create a custom audience and of course AdWords.

Soon after followed suit with their customer match facility but that was only with gmail and email addresses. But the latest update with customer match is that they will match with additional fields such as phone numbers etc.. So that is a pretty savvy update which is no doubt helpful for some people who have other database information and perhaps the match rate with the gmail email addresses wasn’t that great. So you can include name and phone number as well as other matching abilities.

Facebook Updates

So that’s what’s going on within the adwords sphere. Let’s switch gear over to Facebook and you probably know if you’ve had your agent ground even a little bit you’ve probably heard a lot of the chatter about the algorithm update, the consequences of that.

1. Algorithm Update

Personally I’m not panicking about this whole algorithm change for quite awhile now. Facebook has been a pay to play platform and I really analysed Mark Zuckerberg statement quite closely and he made no mention of ads and I don’t really suspect it to impact the ads in any way because that’s their revenue generating mechanism and they are listed companies.

They do need to answer to shareholders. I think the algorithm change was really about all the organic posts and trying to get engagement that way and people I think are experiencing a loss of engagement with some of their organic posts.

Personally for my Facebook ad clients as well as coaching students they haven’t seen a significant impact at all with this algorithm change because I feel it’s got nothing to do with ads at all. So everyone can relax. The Facebook ads I believe are unaffected by this algorithm change.

2. Power Editor to retire soon

I recently got an email from Facebook saying that the power editor is going to be retired. This is a calls for celebration for me as somebody who really disliked the power editor and I didn’t understand why it was so clunky and it really wasn’t a good tool. I like the ability to create a campaign offline so I wonder if they’re going to create something along those lines. But the power editor, I personally found was very very buggy and it was very clunky and difficult to use.

So I personally am celebrating the retiring of the power editor and you may or may not have this in your ad accounts yet because like Adwords and all these other platforms they release things and then they’re in beta for a while and then they slowly applied to all the other accounts.

So if you haven’t seen this email from Facebook or you’re still using the power editor in your ad account. Don’t panic I’m sure very very quickly, you will see that you can’t use it and you just use that ads manager to create all your ads etc..

3. New Placement

So the third update within the Facebook ads sphere is that they’ve announced a new ad placement been running ads on Facebook for some time. You probably know that the news feed is pretty saturated with ads and is getting more and more expensive.

So of course Facebook is looking for additional ad inventory to offer its advertisers. And so it is just started to offer ads within the marketplace placement. And that’s been on Facebook if you’re a Facebook user you might have seen the marketplace which is a place kind of where people buy and sell some of their second hand goods.

So if you’re in e-commerce I think this is actually a really good opportunity to try this new placement because someone is pursuing and viewing the marketplace area. They’re obviously looking to buy something that’s a great opportunity to have an ad for a particular e-commerce product that you’re selling.

So there you have it that’s a very very quick update on some of the latest changes in the PPC industry. Hope you found this episode insightful and helpful in staying up to date with the constant changes obviously in our PPC Academy which is our training community for PPC people. We release these things as soon as they hit the market so you can be sure to stay ahead of your competitors and be up to date with the latest changes in the industry.

So if you’re interested in that, head on over to greenarrowdigital.com/training and you can join the waitlist for the PPC academy there.

Thanks for listening to today’s episode. We’ll create a summary of today’s show notes at talkingwebmarketing.com and talk to you on the next episode.