We’ve seen more changes in PPC Advertising in the last 12 months than we have in the last 5 years.

Because of the rapid rollout of these changes, its easy for both agencies and clients to allow some of these marketing advantages to slip through the cracks.

So here are the top 3 recently released PPC features that we’re most excited about and see as the top 3 opportunities to kick off 2014.

Photo Credit: Andrew Feinberg; via Compfight

1) Facebook Email Remarketing

Ever since Facebook went public, their advertising platform has grown by leaps and bounds.

Facebook Email Retargeting was, in our opinion, the sleeper hit of 2013.

Facebook Email Retargeting allows you to upload any opted-in email database and Facebook will match email addresses to users, giving you the ability to show ads on Facebook to existing leads/customers. Better yet, your ads can be seen to retargeted prospects inside the Facebook News Feed *and* including on mobile devices.

If you have well segmented email lists, this is *the* big game changer for 2014.

2) Facebook & Google Lookalike Audiences

Following on from the above, Facebook not only allow you to retarget existing email leads (incredible enough as it is), but Facebook *also* has given you the ability to target a ‘lookalike’ audience based on any audience you choose.

An obvious example of how to use this could be to:

• Upload a segmented, ‘High Lifetime Customer Value’ email list to Facebook
• Allow Facebook to match these emails to actual users and create a ‘High LCV’ audience
• Then use Facebook to create a lookalike audience (people who share similar characteristics) based on this ‘High LCV’ audience you just defined
• Test ads/offers to this lookalike audience inside the Facebook News Feed on both desktop and mobile

In parallel, Google also (mysteriously quietly) announced Similar Audiences on the Display Network late last year.

Working on the same idea, you can use any audience you have cookied and defined in Adwords (eg. Customers) and then ask Google to create a Similar Audience (again, of people who share similar characteristics as those in your base audience). You can then show your ads to this Similar Audience when they visit sites on the Google Display Network.

3) Bing Ads

Last, but certainly not least, Bing Ads also made a quiet entry into the Australian Market in July last year.

After years of having to use the outdated, cumbersome and very simplistic Yahoo ads interface, Aussie PPC advertisers could now finally use the new Bing Ads interface to market on Bing in Australia.

Apart from the infinitely better user experience, the real breakthrough here, was the addition of the Adwords Import feature.

Now, anyone who has been advertising on Adwords can advertise on Bing at a fraction of the time it used to take on the Yahoo interface.

In our testing, advertising on Bing has brought our Adwords clients an additional 7 to 10% of conversions at 15-20% (yes, that’s right) of the cost per conversion!

We don’t expect Bing costs to stay this low – but you may as well take advantage before the arbitrage window closes.