Basics

People’s Party of Canada Leader Maxime Bernier began a speech in Surrey, B.C., with protesters yelling “PPC, shut it down!” outside a hotel ballroom where a boisterous crowd frequently applauded his proposals to limit immigration.

Security officers barred a door before about a dozen protesters dispersed, some with signs in support of immigrants and refugees.

Much of Bernier’s speech at a Surrey Board of Trade event focused on immigration, which he said requires a “discussion” that, unlike his opponents, he’s not afraid of having in a democracy like Canada.

Bernier said he would slash immigration numbers nearly in half to about 150,000 people a year and 50 per cent of those would have to be “economic” immigrants, such as skilled workers and entrepreneurs.

He said he’s against “mass immigration” but is not anti-immigrant and believes Canada should accept “real refugees,” not those trying to enter Quebec and other parts of the country without crossing at official border checkpoints.

Bernier estimated 40 per cent of the approximately 45,000 refugees who have crossed into Quebec from the United States in the last several years will have to be deported.

“It’s not me who’s saying that, it’s the Department of Immigration because they’re not real refugees,” he told members of

the business community and the public at a Sheraton hotel.

“They will have to be deported in a couple of years from now and that will be very difficult because maybe they will have kids and the kids will be at school and that will be tough to do that.”

Bernier proposes erecting fence

His solution is to erect a fence at Roxham Road in Quebec, where many migrants cross because a road in New York state and one on the Canadian side are separated by just a few metres of brush, and to have RCMP officers stand guard to direct people to cross at an official border crossing, Bernier said.

He wants especially to discuss immigration issues with NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh at two leaders’ debates next month, he said.

“I can tell you I’m ready to have that discussion. I’m ready to have that discussion with Jagmeet Singh at the debate and we’ll see what he’s gonna say.

“One of his supporters suggested Singh would label Bernier’s policies as racist as several people in agreement laughed. Surveys suggest many Canadians want fewer immigrants, he said.

“So I’m not the only one. I must not be the problem,” he said.

Bernier later told reporters he singled out Singh to have a debate on immigration because of the NDP leader’s opposition to his stance.

“When he’s saying that Bernier is having a hateful discussion, something like that, I’m not. I’m speaking about ideas,” he said.

“We’re in a free country. We must be able to discuss that.”

People who are against his proposals are the radicals, not those who support his party, Bernier said.

 

Happy Friday, friends, and welcome to this week’s edition of the Clix Marketing Blog’s PPC News & Views!

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Facebook

Test Your Way to More Impactful Holiday Campaigns

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Have You Tried the Instagram Explore Placement? by Kristin Palmer

There is new information for Google Ads users and PPC experts running Google Ads campaigns. If you haven’t noted, there is an innovative Optimization Score that is now viewable in the Recommendations tab of your accounts. Google first announced plans for including an Optimization Score feature in the new AdWords at the Google Marketing Live event this July.

Your optimization score and recommendations help you prioritize the most impactful actions to improve performance in your account. Advertisers who increased their account-level optimization score by 10 points saw a 10% increase in conversions, on average. Google optimization recently expanded the count to include Shopping campaigns. They are an addition to Search campaigns. The aim is to provide more, real-time recommendations for improving overall account performance.

We are going to have a look at what the new Optimization Score means for your Google Ads accounts and how much you should read into it.

It’s a Score Based on Google’s Recommendations

Your Optimization Score is an estimate of your performance based on Google’s recommendations. The scores range between 0% and 100% for PPC marketing agency. They entirely depend on your implementation of these suggestions. Google’s optimization support page notes that the score gets calculated in real-time and based on several different factors. Considerations in the optimization score include:

Statistics, settings, and the status of your account and campaigns

Relevant impact of available recommendations

Recent recommendations history

Trends in the ad’s ecosystem

Google looks at each category and then weighs recommendations believed to improve the performance of your Google Ads campaigns.

Implementing recommendations increases your optimization score

Your score comes alongside with a list of recommendations from Google, with each proposal displaying how much it can increase your count. According to Google’ssupport page, applying or dismissing these recommendations changes the overall optimization score of your account. You can find the optimization score available at the Campaign, Account, and Manager Account levels. It’s also worth to note that the Optimization Score is still in beta and only displays for Search campaigns. 

Clicking each recommendation reveals more details

Each proposal displays additional information, such as changing bidding strategies, implementing specific ad units, using extensions, among others. Google also shows the estimated impact of each recommendation if executed. Besides, it also displays the reasoning behind the suggestion initalic text. It’s a new, somewhat elementary analysis of what can get improved from Google’s perspective.

Senior Paid Search Manager at CPC Strategy, Erick Smith notes that for now, optimization recommendations will only display for Target CPA. It is likely because the majority of Google’s conversion data comes from lead-gen conversions. They may roll out suggestions for Target ROAS in the future.

Treat Optimization Recommendations with Scrutiny

The Optimization Score is a novel addition to the new suite of AdWords features. However, search specialists note that the recommendations aren’t always necessary. That’s why it’s best to evaluate your suggestions on a case-by-case basis.

This feature can be useful to a PPC expert company, but you should treat it with heavy scrutiny. Some suggestions make sense while others may not, like placing specific keywords into an ad group that already includes them. It also got noted by Erick Smith, Senior Paid Search Manager at CPC Strategy

What will happen if you don’t implement the recommendations

You don’t have to enforce any of the proposals, as there is an option to dismiss them. If you choose to reject a suggestion, it will still count toward your Optimization Score. The Senior Retail Search Manager at CPC Strategy Chris Pezolli said that Dismissing any of the recommendations will again increase the overall Optimization Score. They will, however, show up as a grayed-out portion in the bar.

The Two Levers of Growing Ad Revenue with Google Shopping

The two factors of Google Shopping success have been repeatedly to influence campaign performance.

Quality Score

The quality score is pivotal to Google’s decision of where your products rank. When a search query triggers a product, the highest bid does not automatically win. Google wants ads that are relevant, useful, and safe for the user. It does this by calculating a quality score. Stores with a high bid, but a low-quality score may not win the auction. How your products rank is a combination of quality and effort.

The quality score for shopping ads is vaguer than search ads. Google has kept the formula of quality score for shopping ads a secret. They often refer to it in their support documentation as “product history” or “feed quality.” One possible reason is to counter its competitors like Bing from duplicating their advertising system. The more likely reason it seems is to protect their network from marketers in the same way their algorithms for organic search are blurred. However, like SEO best practices, Google educates its users so we can improve a store’s presence on the channel. It boils down to how you can better serve the person Googling.

There are more instant ways and best practices to improve your quality score. Review all attributes of your feed to see how they can get promoted. The most influential include title, description, product category, unique product identifiers, and images.

Bids

The second major element of shopping campaign success is bidding. Pay too much for a click to gobble up your PPC solutions profits. Pay too little, and your ad will fall short of the impressions or clicks required to get sales.

The goal is to apply the right bid to the right products at the right time. Segmentation of ad groups and product groups lets you use the correct offer to products. It is where you need to see what products get the impressions and clicks then appropriately segment your product groups so you can apply the right bids. Bid adjustments then let you use the correct proposal for people at the right time. The four major bid adjustments for shopping campaigns are devices, locations, ad schedule, and audience lists.

In 1968, in the first televised Canadian leaders debate, in a long ago era of skinny ties and all-male political events, CBC, CTV and Radio Canada invited the leaders of Canada’s national political parties into the living rooms of the nation to discuss their policies.

For the first hour and 15 minutes, the leaders of the day — Liberal Leader Pierre Trudeau, Progressive Conservative Leader Robert Stanfield and New Democratic Leader Tommy Douglas — sat behind podiums, standing in turn when called upon to politely discuss their policies in a manner that now seems quaintly non-confrontational.

With 45 minutes left, the organizers brought in Réal Caouette, leader of Ralliement Créditiste, a Quebec party with nine seats in the House.

Caouette, whose party has since disappeared, was a social conservative and advocate for quirky theories about monetary policy, occupying a similar position in the political landscape as Maxime Bernier’s Peoples Party does today.

It seems to me that the organizers of that first debate were right to invite Mr. Caouette and also right to give him less time than the other leaders, and the consortium of nine media outlets putting together two debates in this campaign would be wise to consider the precedent.

On Monday, the commission organizing the debates announced that Bernier had met the threshold for inclusion in the debates as established by the government last year.

It is hard to fault commissioner David Johnston, who was appointed governor general by Stephen Harper, for including Bernier.

READ MORE: 9 must-see moments from the 2019 National Leaders Debate

Since he bolted the Conservatives and set up his own party, Bernier has signed up 40,000 members, recruited candidates across the country, raised significant amounts of money and managed to win a fair amount of media coverage.

Johnston initially ruled that Bernier could not participate. When Bernier objected, Johnston asked for a list of five ridings that the party might win. Johnston hired Ekos to poll those ridings,  and determined that the party is competitive in several of them. (The Ekos polls found that in the ridings surveyed, those who declared a vote for the PPC either possible, likely or certain ranged between 24 and 34 per cent.)

Given all that, it seems Johnston had little chance but to invite Bernier.

The Conservatives and New Democrats objected immediately. NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said that the commission should not have invited Bernier because “it’s wrong to give Mr. Bernier the platform to spread his hateful and divisive message.”

Although I find Bernier’s positions on immigration and climate change to be bone-headed, the commission is not empowered, not should it be, to weigh the party’s platforms and only approve participants who are proposing ideas that are not hateful or divisive.

The Conservatives instead focussed on a process they think is fixed.

“It’s no big surprise that Justin Trudeau’s hand-picked debate panel used a Liberal-friendly pollster who attacks Andrew Scheer to ultimately justify Mr. Bernier’s attendance at the debate,” the party said in a release. “Trudeau has been stacking the deck for months, using the power of his office to tilt the playing field in his favour for this election.”

This is not accurate. The commission’s advisory panel, which includes Deborah Grey, the first Reform MP elected in Canada, did not make this call. Johnston did, and the Conservatives would face an uphill battle convincing anyone he is a Liberal stooge.

The Conservatives may be forgiven their angry message, though, because they must be terribly disappointed to learn that Scheer’s former rival for the leadership of their party will join the debate, raising his profile among right-leaning voters who have not been paying close attention.

This is potentially disastrous for Scheer, mostly because Bernier seems to have scores to settle with him. Bernier made it clear after his narrow loss to Scheer that he thought some funny things happened when they were counting the votes. His subsequent departure from the CPC and establishment of his own party makes sense if he thinks that the party cheated him out of the leadership.

If he can win five per cent of the votes in ridings across Canada, which will be much likelier if people have seen him in a debate, it gets much harder for the Conservatives to beat the Liberals in this election.

Scheer is in a vice, with Bernier on his right and Trudeau on his left. It does not look like a comfortable position. If he moves too far to the right, Trudeau can warn suburban centrists that he’s extreme. If he moves too far to the centre, Bernier can make a pitch to voters who dislike pride parades and think Canada’s letting in too many Muslims.

That’s politics, which isn’t always a very nice business.

But the media, which is already viewed with suspicion by many right-leaning voters, should take care that they are not helping Scheer and Trudeau tighten the vice.

In this election, there are two candidates who might become prime minister: Scheer and Trudeau. At the debates next month, Canadians need to hear from Singh, Bernier, Green Leader Elizabeth May and Bloc Quebecois Leader Yves-François Blanchet, but it is not written anywhere that they deserve as much time on our TVs as the two front runners.

MORE BY STEPHEN MAHER:

• Is that a Conservative campaigner calling, or a recording?
• The Elizabeth May show and the first leaders debate
• The problem with Joe Oliver’s soothing words on climate change
• Treasure hunters flock to Oak Island, where no one has ever found treasure

Maxime Bernier launched his party’s campaign from his home riding of Beauce on Sunday. 

Bernier delivered a speech in front of a few hundred supporters gathered.

The People’s Party of Canada leader says he’s prepared for the election, adding he will have to balance his national tour with being present in his riding. 

“I will spend a lot of time in Beauce because I do not take anything for granted,” he said in French.

He presented himself as the long-awaited alternative to the old federal parties, the same as he said last August when he split from the Conservative Party during their national policy convention.

At that time, Bernier called his former party “intellectually and morally corrupt.”  

During that resignation — a year after his defeat in the party leadership race — Bernier denounced the Conservatives for being too close to Liberal policies. 

The People’s Party has named candidates in almost all the 338 federal ridings. Bernier was first elected an MP in 2006 in the same riding his father held. The PPC is polling at just under 3 per cent nationally.

“After traveling the country and meeting thousands of Canadians, I can tell you that there is an appetite for our alternative,” he told supporters in French.

But Bernier will face a tough fight in his own riding. 

Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives have nominated Richard Lehoux, who was the leader of the Quebec Federation of Municipalities. Lehoux is also a former dairy farmer and has been Mayor of Saint-Elzéar for 19 years.

Tories vs. People’s Party

Bernier admitted he would be absent from Beauce for approximately 35 days of the election campaign.

His new party has also come under fire for being associated with alt-right groups and anti-immigrant sentiment. 

A PPC government would lower the number of immigrants Canada accepts to between 100,000 and 150,000 per year — a level not seen since 1986 — Bernier has said previously.

His Conservative challenger picked up on that, saying the people of Beauce fall to the right of the political spectrum, but not the far right.

People are torn between the Bernier family legacy and traditional Conservative values, Lehoux said.

Bernier has also not been invited to the official election debates, as he failed to meet the criteria. 

He argues that not inviting him to take part in the official election debates means excluding the only political party leader who has anything different to say.

“It won’t be a real debate if I’m not there,” Bernier said.

By
Josh K. Elliott

Senior National Online Journalist, Viral/Trends  Global News

The Conservative Party of Canada has a new song, and party leader Andrew Scheer is taking it on tour.

The party marked the start of the federal election campaign on Wednesday by unveiling Get Ahead, a specially commissioned rock anthem to be played at all of Scheer’s election rallies.

READ MORE:
Canadian federal campaign officially underway, voters head to polls on Oct. 21

The song was written by Canadian singer Bryan Adams‘ longtime co-writer, Jim Vallance, who helped pen such hits as Summer of ’69, Run to You and Cuts Like a Knife.

The new song is a simple, upbeat rock track, and the first few guitar chords sound reminiscent of ’69.

The lyrics themselves are based on the Conservatives’ campaign slogan: “It’s time for you to get ahead.”

Vallance wrote both an English-only and a bilingual version of the song.

Here are the lyrics to the English version:

A brand-new day,

a better way.

It’s time for you

to get ahead!

It’s your choice,

let’s hear your voice.

It’s time for you

to get ahead!

(repeat)

The party is expected to release a music video for the song sometime this week.

“This is a creative way for our campaign to get our message and our campaign slogan out,” Scheer’s spokesperson, Simon Jefferies, told Global News in a statement.

Rally music can become a contentious issue during political campaigns. For example, several artists — including Rihanna, Aerosmith and Pharrell Williams — have complained about U.S. President Donald Trump using their songs at rallies.

This is the first time the Conservatives have specifically commissioned a song for an election campaign, and it should help them avoid any potential public disputes with an artist.

READ MORE:
PPC Leader Maxime Bernier to face another Maxime Bernier in his riding

The party’s previous leader, Stephen Harper, used the song Better Now by band Collective Soul for his 2008 and 2015 election campaigns.

The Conservatives did not specify who sang Get Ahead. It almost certainly wasn’t Harper, although the former PM has been known to belt out a song or two in the past.

Global News has reached out to the other federal parties to inquire about their election songs.

“We will unveil our song during the campaign,” a spokesperson for the Liberal Party said. “We always look forward to highlighting great Canadian music and musicians.”

The other parties did not reply by press time.

READ MORE:
Everything you need to know about the 2019 federal leaders’ debates

Vallance, 67, was born in British Columbia and has been writing music for more than four decades. He collaborated with Bryan Adams on many of his songs and has also worked with acts including Aerosmith, Ozzy Osbourne, Glass Tiger and Joan Jett.

He was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2007.

“This song has been blaring in our office on repeat,” Jefferies said. “It keeps getting catchier and catchier with every play.”

Follow @JoshKElliott

© 2019 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.