Staying on the Leading Edge of PPC Platforms

Hey everybody, Adam Arkfeld with ParaCore. As a PPC agency, sometimes it’s really difficult to stay on top of trending news and what’s happening in the pay-per-click advertising world. Facebook has its own newsroom that has updates that come out literally probably at least once or a couple times a week. AdWords is always rolling out new features, and that doesn’t even touch on some of the other platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and Bing.

So, as an account manager working at a PPC agency or as an auditor that’s wanting my account managers to be kept up-to-date, sometimes it’s really hard to keep everyone aware of what changes are happening and having them rely on their own research is really difficult. So, on the left-hand side here you can actually see an email that is sent once a week to our account managers, an example of one. And actually my wife is doing these right now, she’s helping us out. But the email is an overview of what’s happened in the world of pay-per-click in the last week or so.

So, it’s sent to my SEM team, Dustin’s on it, he helps me with business development, and he oversees outdoor venture marketing, and it just goes over all of the updates. So, new requirements for custom audiences, new innovations, LinkedIn carousel ads. That’s something most of my people on my team wouldn’t have been aware of because LinkedIn is not as prevalent of a technology that we’re using at least as far as paid ads go. And then sometimes she’ll be pulling in things like mobile-first indexing. So she includes the title, a brief overview of what the article is about, and then also a link to the article so that we can look into it and read more. So in a meeting this morning, we were reviewing an account that does a lot of LinkedIn advertising, and we just started talking about carousel ads as an opportunity. And the only reason that was even part of the conversation is because we all got this email on Monday morning when we came into the office. So this is a really, really incredible way to make sure that the entire account management team and anybody working in the account is kept up to date.

Now, you might be wondering how we aggregate all this information. It may seem like a ton of work, and it is some work, but it’s probably not as much as you would think. So we use a feed aggregator service called Feedly. Oops, that’s not the feed aggregator service, that’s the email that I was just showing you. That’s also the email I was just showing you. So we use a feed aggregator service called Feedly, and this is an example of Feedly. So, basically you… You create this account and in different categories, and you can organize ’em however you want. You can add news feeds from different organizations. So here you can see we’ve added AdEspresso, Bing ads, Facebook for Business, Facebook Newsroom, PPC Hero, Search Engine Land, WordStream Feed, so all of these different feeds are pulling in new articles all of the time. And so in the case of… My wife is doing this right now. She logs into my Feedly account and she basically just goes through each one of these.

Now, it’s important to, to mention that when we get these updates, when we get these emails, I’ve instructed her and other people that have done it in the past not provide how-to articles or strategic articles or anything related to, like… How, you know, like best practices? It’s all about platform updates, because this email is just all about platform updates. And if you start including all of the strategy stuff, then the email gets really long, there might be 20 links in there and then at that point we’ve noticed our account managers start to glaze over and don’t even read ’em because there’s too much information. So we just keep it to a very small amount of information that just talks about the current updates in the platforms, and maybe every now and then mobile-first indexing, which is kind of important.

So at ParaCore, this is how stay up-to-date, it’s how we stay on the leading edge of all the pay-per-click advertising updates that are occurring on a regular basis. It’s not that hard to set up. You can just set up a Feedly account, and then have someone go through that account once a week and send an email. I’ve even had virtual assistants do this in the past. If they’re even remotely tech-savvy, they’ll know how to distinguish between platform updates versus strategic updates and then send those emails to you. So, I highly recommend checking it out. Thanks for watching the video. Again my name’s Adam with ParaCore. If you have any questions or comments, please leave it below. Thanks a lot.