The Four Dimensions of Liquidity in PPC Campaigns

In the world of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, liquidity is a key concept that defines how fluidly a campaign can adapt to drive performance. Here’s a breakdown of the four dimensions of liquidity and how each one can impact your campaigns.

1. Placement Liquidity

Placement liquidity refers to the flexibility in ad placements. Essentially, it’s about where your ads appear. By allowing more placement options, you increase your campaign’s reach and potential effectiveness. For example, a Google campaign with a negative mobile bid adjustment is limiting its reach on mobile, just as a Facebook campaign that avoids Automatic Placements restricts itself from other placements. Allowing ads to serve across more placements improves performance by increasing exposure across different channels and contexts.

2. Audience Liquidity

Audience liquidity focuses on showing ads to the broadest, most relevant audience possible. Limiting your audience too strictly can restrict growth, so leveraging tools to broaden targeting is often a wise move. For instance, enabling LinkedIn’s Audience Expansion option or selecting broad match keywords in Google Ads can help increase audience liquidity. By reaching a larger pool of potential customers, you allow the ad platforms’ algorithms more flexibility to find and convert your ideal audience.

3. Budget Liquidity

Budget liquidity means setting budgets that can adapt to opportunities without unnecessary restrictions. While you don’t need an unlimited budget, giving PPC campaigns some flexibility with how budgets are allocated can make a difference. Rather than setting segmented budgets for each campaign, PPC managers can enhance liquidity by consolidating campaigns and employing shared budgets. On Facebook, Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) is an effective way to manage budget liquidity, as it allocates spend to the best-performing ad sets in real-time.

4. Creative Liquidity

Creative liquidity is achieved by allowing ad platforms to test and optimize creative assets automatically. This enables the system to identify which elements resonate most with users. Responsive Search Ads (RSA) in Google and Dynamic Ads in Facebook are prime examples, as they test headlines, descriptions, and images to serve the best-performing combinations to users. With this flexibility, the platforms can respond to user preferences and boost engagement, unlocking creative liquidity for better performance.

Giving Machines Room to Run

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) emphasizes the value of giving machine learning room to work by setting broad parameters. While it may be tempting to control every detail in a campaign, media planners can use machine learning as a tool to surface insights and spot new opportunities. By broadening targeting and budget settings, planners can let the system explore and learn, ultimately helping unlock additional value in campaigns.

In short, allowing flexibility across placement, audience, budget, and creative dimensions can unleash the full potential of your PPC campaigns and make machine learning your ally in optimizing for the best results.

To see more, check out Join or Die: Chapter 4