Semalt Reveals Hidden PPC Features You Didn't Know About



PPC is something every web professional is familiar with. While they contribute significantly to the success of a website, there are certain features of PPC only a few professionals have discovered. Luckily for you, Semalt not only knows these undiscovered perks but were also willing to share these ideas with you. 

The PPC features we will be mentioning here are either greatly underutilized, undiscovered, or new, so we figured we try them out, and they were impressive. Some of the features we discovered are in the form of settings. They remain unknown because they are truly difficult to find, but by simply switching that on or off button, they can potentially impact your account settings significantly. 

Hidden PPC features that take your campaign to a whole new level

Implementing one or two of these hidden treasures gives you something to brag about in your next meeting. Some clients have returned with a smile on their faces because their executives were impressed by what Semalt has done to their PPC campaign. Some of that credit goes to our knowledge of these secrets. 

Let's go ahead and reveal some reasons why you should have Semalt run your PPC campaign. 

Call Reports and Recording

For a client who prefers to use call-only ads or calls extensions, they may have never noticed the ready-made report outlining the details about the call received through Google Ads. 

This report is particularly useful as it gives critical details about the call like the:
We can add several other metrics to the report to better inform our optimization and strategies for phone call engagement. Why this feature hasn't been discovered by many other professionals is probably because it is difficult to locate. 

Have you noticed that Google Ads now offers its users the ability to record the calls you receive from click-to-call ads and call extensions? These recordings can be listened to and downloaded at a later date if you decide. Each report has a 30-day expiration date; once that time passes, recorded calls get expired.

To enable this feature, you must opt-in to call recording and reporting in your account settings.

Remarketing for products

With Microsoft Ads, marketers can get a remarketing list for products that allow their clients to target searchers using the specific product ID they interacted with. Using that information, we can now promote your product which these search engine users have shown purchase intent and show them as ads. 

These Ads get served in search and the Microsoft Audience network. The dynamic remarketing feature on Google also has a similar feature. To activate this feature, we combine the Microsoft Merchant Centre catalog feed and then implement the Microsoft Advertising UET tag on the pages on your website. 

Microsoft audience Network

Microsoft's audience network helps us reach more people in your Microsoft Ads campaigns. John Lee, Head of Evangelism at Microsoft Advertising, recommends that marketers should extend search campaigns to the Microsoft Audience network for:

Message extensions

This is an underused extension that has holds promise for small to medium scale businesses that already have a system in place to respond to text messages from prospects. Instead of calling, ad viewers can respond to an ad by sending a text. At the end of certain ads, you will see the CTA "Text us now for more information" response to such ads automatically sent as a text message or a forwarded email. 

Advertisers, in this case, can specify the messaging that the respondent can automatically use as the return message. This, of course, is a great extension for consultants, maintenance specialists, or real estate agents. 

Search for partners

Many SEO professionals have forgotten that they can serve ads on Google's and Microsoft search partners. Using this feature allows your ads to show up on other search sites that display ads powered by Microsoft or Google. 

Here are two key areas we explored when using search partners: 
  1. Reporter: In both Google and Microsoft Ads, users can see in both Microsoft and Google Ads the performance of every ad can be seen from a campaign view, ad group view, or keyword by clicking on the "segment" button to break out the performance. On either platform, the network data is available in the report tab. 
  2. Setting: On each platform, in the campaign settings, we can opt out of search partners if the results are poor. 

LinkedIn profile targeting

This is one of the best new features released by Microsoft. If you've been following our site, you will understand the value of using social media for audience targeting. LinkedIn takes this to a whole new level thanks to this hard-to-find feature. 

This update now allows marketers to target an audience in LinkedIn by parameters such as a job function, industry, and company. We can also boost bids for the selected values within these three dimensions. Since these audiences are "bid only" they won't reduce the available traffic. 

Multi-Image Extensions + multimedia ads

Using this, we can make your text ads stand out in Bing. By enhancing tests with multiple images, they become more attractive to viewers, which makes them easier to spot and read. This ad extension can display up to five images on the first ad on the mainline only. Multimedia ads which are a lot similar, also just got announced by Microsoft Ads. While this new update is currently in pilot, this new ad extension will allow marketers to use videos to enhance their ads. This feature, however, is exclusive to Microsoft Advertising.

Overlap and Outranking information

This reporting gem in Google Ads brought joy to us the day it was discovered. This option is basically a report we collect by using auction insights and automated reports to help find information that improves bidding and optimization on an ad account. 

For clients who prefer running ads on broad e-commerce operations, both on their merchant site and in marketplaces such as Amazon can keep track of their competitive positioning on brand, category, and product keywords. 

This feature is so cool that it reminds us to check by appearing as a notification in our inbox. We can then open it up to check the competitive landscape and adjust our client's bidding to achieve the optimum placement against competitors and distributors. 

Data studio

While this isn't something that is as hidden as the rest, only those who get fully into Data Studio understand how beneficial it can be. Many people don't have a clue that such a powerful tool exists. Google Ads aside, this reporting tools serves as a terminal linking us to other data sources, including:

Game Placement / Topics

Have you considered having your ads appearing in-game placements? If you haven't, you should consider it as it can give you a sudden surge in traffic and fast tanking results. If the product you're offering is an app or game, you should be utilizing this feature. While this is perfect for that class of business owners, its absolutely terrible for anyone else for two reasons:
Some years ago, Google moved the game placement choice to an even deeper location making it more difficult to find, but it now has more detailed options, which makes it worth the search. Fine-tuning your game placement will help your ads serve more relevant placements. 

Expanded audience in display

Google Ads, by default, turns on a feature called "expanded audiences", which allows Google to serve the ads on that account to a similar type of audience and not only to the audience placement you selected for your campaign. 

This is both a good and a bad thing, so to ensure you get more benefits than losses from this, we can control just how wide or narrow this extension gets. 

Conclusion 

Our extensive knowledge of PPC ensures that your PPC campaign isn't just successful for the time being but that its effects can still be felt after a long while. Hidden features like these wouldn't just make you perform better than your competition, but you will be leaving them on the horizon of your rearview mirror. 

Interested in SEO? Check out our other articles on the Semalt blog.