PPC Strategist

05/05/2026

Most of us run Microsoft Ads by importing from Google. Which means most of us are overlooking the extensions Microsoft has built that Google doesn’t offer at all.

Action Extensions, Filter Links, Flyer Extensions, Video Extensions - all native to Microsoft, all worth exploring.

01/05/2026

There's more to Google Ads Editor than most of us appreciate.

I've been using it for years, and I only recently started exploring some of the features buried beneath the usual bulk edits and find-and-replace. A few of them are genuinely powerful.

In this week's post, I've pulled together five that are worth knowing about. They range from small time-savers (a spell checker you probably didn't know existed) to some properly useful QA tools - like filter functions that let you query ad groups based on what's inside them, and custom rules you can build to catch mistakes before you post changes.

If you use Editor regularly, there's a good chance at least a couple of these will be new to you.

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Google Ads Editor has more depth than most of us use. Five features - from formula words to custom rules - that are worth exploring.

28/04/2026

If your remarketing campaign is reaching more people than expected, Optimized Targeting might be on. With it enabled, your audiences aren’t strict targets - they’re signals. Worth checking under ad group settings.

21/04/2026

My latest blog post covers a switch to maximise conversion value that looked, on paper, like an obvious win.

The account had clear, differentiated lead stages and a meaningful value gap between them, so the logic seemed sound.

In practice, CPCs jumped, lower-stage conversions dropped by a third, and the higher-stage conversions we were chasing also declined.

Follow the link in my bio to the post to find out why it went wrong and what to do instead. It comes down to giving Google a better clue. (Did you know ‘clue’ originally meant a ball of string? Ariadne’s, to help Theseus find his way out of the labyrinth.)

21/04/2026

Demographic reports in Google Ads get a fair bit of attention for the known groups. Age brackets, male versus female.

There’s another row that tends to get ignored. ‘Unknown’. It looks like a noise bucket - the leftover users Google couldn’t classify.

But ‘Unknown’ isn’t a random sample. It’s mostly users who weren’t signed into their Google account when they clicked. A specific cohort, which often performs meaningfully differently from the averages of the known groups. If it underperforms, it’s a candidate for exclusion like any other weak segment.

17/04/2026

👀 Value-based bidding is meant to beat max conversions. The logic is hard to argue with: tell the algorithm which conversions matter more, and it'll guide itself better than a flat-value strategy ever could.

I've argued this principle myself, repeatedly.

Then I moved two campaigns in a plateauing account over to Maximise Conversion Value. Strong value differentiation, clean setup, the textbook case for it.

CPCs in the campaigns I'd switched jumped by over 60% in a month, and the high-value conversions I was actually chasing declined... and so did the lower-value conversions that had been doing fine without it.

The mechanism is the interesting part, and it's changed how I think about what to feed smart bidding in general. There's a precondition for VBB that's rarely discussed, and when it isn't met, the theoretical advantage becomes an active handicap.

Full breakdown, the data, and the two ways out in my latest blog post.

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Value-based bidding outperforms max conversions in theory. In one plateauing account, it didn't. Here's why, and what the mechanism tells us about smart bidding.

14/04/2026

Competitor impression share in Auction Insights is a reasonable starting point, but it doesn’t really tell us what we want to know.

Overlap rate and position above rate, read together, map much more closely onto real competitive pressure. Multiply the two and you’ve got what I’ve been calling a Competitive Pressure Index.

03/04/2026

Impression share lost to budget is one of the biggest missed opportunities I see in accounts.

If there’s a surplus of available traffic that your campaign isn’t serving, then you can afford to reduce your bids - or to cut out underperforming segments of targeting - without reducing your overall volume. The surplus backfills the gap, and what replaces it can be expected to perform better than what you removed, because you selected the weakest parts to cut.

It’s slack that most accounts have available, and one of the most straightforward efficiency gains you can get.

31/03/2026

When you compare ads by CTR, the aggregate numbers can trick you.

One ad can have a lower overall CTR but actually outperform in both top and other positions. It just has more impressions in lower positions, which drags the average down.

The top vs. other segment reveals what’s really going on. Compare like with like before drawing conclusions.

27/03/2026

Running a national campaign but want locally relevant ad text? Dynamic Keyword Insertion and Dynamic Location Insertion can both help - in different ways.

DLI is especially worth testing on “”near me”” searches, where location intent is high but no location is actually named. The CTR impact tends to be significant.

19/03/2026

There's a loop most PPC managers have been stuck in.

Raise your target CPA: volume improves but efficiency tanks. Lower it: efficiency recovers but volume dies... Every change just swaps one problem for the other.

Target adjustments can take you a long way, but sometimes the problem isn't where you've set the target, but how much leverage it has.

There's something in the bid equation that explains why... and how low CVR doesn't just cost you conversions directly; it limits how much your target CPA can actually do for you.

This post digs into the mechanics.

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When target CPA adjustments just swap one problem for another, the target isn't the issue. Your conversion rate determines how much leverage those changes actually have.