My Takeaway From PPC Camp 2024
My personal top takeaways from my favorite event: PPC Camp
How is it different from other events?
Frankly, with classic conferences, you can't dive deep into a topic. The presentations are only about 20-30 minutes, and coffee breaks are too short for longer conversations.
Imagine an event where you have 24 different presentations, but you can spend hours in discussions with over 50 senior paid experts because you are locked in the middle of nowhere for three days.
That is PPC Camp—a place where you can go deeper into the topics that interest you, and people can be really honest.
Let's get into what resonanted with me the most.
Tracking and Analytics
Click IDs are the future in tracking.
As server-side tracking becomes mainstream, people use it differently to capture the identifiers and map them across browsers. (Like using functional cookies alongside analytical ones. Or treating email links as another identifier)
Data Layer enhancements.
Use transaction ID parameters even for lead generation conversions to do conversion value adjustments or identifying new vs existing customers.
Soft conversions and how to use them.
The best discussion was how to analyze the soft events that have a high correlation to the hard conversion and what these outliers usually are.
The most advanced approach was without a doubt showed Anna Czarnoba and Martina Machová that shared sneak peeks of their predictive model.
They analyze business value for each session. The ML calculation is done 30 minutes after the session ends and takes almost 350 inputs to estimate the probability of converting. Each hour, they send to Google predicted users (gclids) that had more than a 15% probability of converting.
Feeding the black box (smart bidding algorithms) with the right data can really be a game-changer for your business.
Lead Gen Tips
Small changes in lead forms can affect the submission rate and indicate the intent of the users. Adding friction (an extra open question) filters out those without real intent.
If you’re closing deals from "low-intent" forms that ask just for email/phone for an ebook, cold calling may perform similarly, and you could get contact data from cheaper sources than paid ads.
The biggest killer of lead gen tactics is when sales follow up too late. A huge difference exists between calling an hour after submission and the next morning, let alone days or weeks later.
I heard several inventive methods to incentivize sales to pick the leads quickly or performing "sales mystery shopping" to ensure sales teams keep their promises. I learned a lot about using SMS in the workflow.
领英推荐
Demand Gen Tips
This new Google Ads format really performs well for many experts (including cases that prove that it can be important profitable performance channel). I have many personal to-dos for testing.
My main takeaway is that the minimal daily budget needs to be at least 10-15x the average CPA per each ad group (not campaign). Most demand gen conversions are post-engaged views, so test and scale to enough volume until you can rely on post-view conversions #cookiedepreciation.
Don’t just analyze the results in the audience section; check the insights tab. Look at audience index and other metrics. Test different creatives—I was surprised that the best-performing format for 6clickz is a static banner without any text and how high engagement carousel ads have when visuals are done right.
Creative Testing
Use an analytical approach to drive creativity. Split it into pieces. In a nutshell:
This might sound like a lot of work for video/ad creation, but it is "just" repurposing existing videos.
Cut the video into pieces by shots. For example, a 30-second video is made of 7 shots: hook, problem, solution, product benefit A, product benefit B, social proof, CTA. Shuffle the order of these shots in different videos and analyze which order works best and which shots perform poorly and need redo.
YouTube Campaigns
Zuzana Valíková run experimental ads - long annoying ad (repeating one phrase on a static background) hat no sane person would watch, expecting users to skip it if they pay attention.
The results were shocking—optimizing on CPV drove 16% completion rate (people completed it even in a 10-minute video version)
Media planning tip: Calculate if CPV optimization is worth the quality. More expensive CPV with CPM optimization might result in cheaper CPV of people that actually paid attention. (read more about imporatance of attentive impressions )
Shorts have a much worse CTR than YT in-stream ads. But Shorts vs Meta Reels, they generate 2x better CPM and significantly better CPV, CPC, and cost per 100% views. Btw. Shorts was even the key placement for the profitable demand gen campaigns I mentioned above.
Conclusion
These notes are just the things that resonated with me the most. For others, the list might be different. Each PPC camp is unique because it depends on you. On the discussions you join and the questions you ask.
Check out personal notes from Petra Pacáková or the summary with all slides (in Czech).
Thank you uLab Petr Bure? +Markéta Kabátová for organiying this.
PS:Please, Let me know if there is any similar multiple-day event for marketers where you can really dive into the topics that interest you.