Whatever holiday you celebrate, we hope you are starting to feel festive.  Don’t forget to tell your boss that holiday bonuses are nice, but not expected or required.  (JUST KIDDING!)  It’s the best part of the year!  Unless you’re Clark Griswold, that is.

Without further ado, let’s review what happened in the wonderful world of PPC this week.

First, from Google….

This coming Thursday (12/13) and the following Thursday (12/20) at 11 AM PDT, Google will host two Google Plus Hangouts to help improve campaign performance during this critical season.  The topic of the first session is How to create stand-out ads during the competitive holiday season. The second session is about How to maintain the holiday momentum.  To join the Hangouts, just sign into Google+ and add the Google Ads +Page to your circles. Then, on Thursday, go to your Stream where you’ll be able to view the Hangout live with just one click.

Did you know that brands have created over 1 million Google+ pages in just the past few months?  It’s the giant social media elephant in the room and it’s not going away.  Google had another Google+ Hangout last week about Building a Digital Brand with Google+.  If you missed it, you can see a recording here.  The presentation uses Cadbury and H&M Google+ build outs and promotions to demonstrate the value it could have for others.

Have you taken advantage of the ability to see Analytics data in AdWords?  Like Jon Gritton, who is interviewed in this article, we have wondered why this didn’t happen sooner!  He touches on why it’s so useful to be able to see visitor metrics like bounce rate, pages per visit, and average visit duration to see how campaigns are really performing.  Mr. Gritton finds the bounce rate feature to be the most useful as it helps realign his campaigns.  We mostly like not having to toggle back and forth between Analytics and AdWords.

Now, from Bing…….

There was only one post in the Bing Ads blog this week.  Maybe they’re super busy working on a million updates like they were in the summer/early fall (view all previous PPC Roundups for details).

Using online dating sites as a metaphor for keyword performance (?) Bing Ads offers an in-depth look at Quality Scores and how they are determined.  The first thing they point out that is good to avoid low Quality Scores is to avoid using broad match keywords.  The recommended solution for this is to use the Broad Match Modifier, which only allows your ads to show if someone uses the exact terms in their search, in whatever order.  Check out the post Bing Ads Cure Keywords Caught in Bad Romance for more info.

Finally, from other parts of the web………

Looking for some new ways to say click here?  This post from Search Engine Journal’s got 20 of them.  It’s always fun to see something like this as we are mired down in day to day work.  Are there any you would add to the list?

Last week we blogged about Scroogled, and this week it seems like there’s just a lot of confusion.  This article from Search Engine Land (SEL) gives a pretty thorough look at why Google is wrong, why Bing is wrong, and what should be done.  Check it out.

If you are looking for guidance on setting up campaigns for PLAs, look no further! How To Take Control Over PLAs & Product Search from SEL gives a good overview about where to start.

Finally, the HubSpot blog gives a timely post on How to Set SMART Marketing Goals for 2013.  It’s a template that includes 6 steps to making sure that you are going into the New Year with clearly defined goals and your eyes wide open.

That’s it for this week, friends!  Enjoy your weekend!