What PPC Trends You Should Lookout For This Year!

PPC (pay-per-click) is a popular digital marketing strategy as it delivers effective results, but knowing how to utilise everything Google Ads has to offer is key to the success of your account. 

So what is instore for PPC as we look towards 2020? We have gathered the top new features and strategies you should be considering to ensure you are getting the best results within your budget. 

Automation, AI & Machine Learning

Everyone in the digital marketing scene is talking about the upcoming changes due to Automation, AI & Machine Learning. With artificial intelligence, Google and other advertising platforms, able to collect user data and identify the best possible audience for your campaign. But what does this mean for you as a marketer?  

Here are three things to consider:

1. Responsive Search Ads

Responsive Ads are the newest and largest search ad format in Google Ads. They’re also the most flexible, allowing you to receive more headlines, more characters and automated testing. Google Ads will assemble these entries into multiple ad combinations. Using its algorithm, Google will decide what Ads are the most suitable & effective based on specific user search queries.

2. Ad Strength

The Ad Strength metric measures the relevance, quality, and diversity of your ad content. You will be shown your ad strength while creating your ad content and it will assist you in understanding whether your content is unique enough to show up for a users search term, the higher the Ad Strength, the more likely your ad will show.

3. Optimisation Score Metric

The Optimisation Score metric is a measure of your overall Google Ads account performance. This metric will be affected by your bids, budget, keywords and several other factors, determined useful by Google, including: 

• Your account and campaign settings, status, and statistics.
• Recent recommendations history.
• Trends developing in your ads.

Amazon Ads

When you think of PPC, you usually think of Google or Facebook, but Amazon is quickly catching up to both platforms as one of the best platforms for paid ads.  Amazon Ads are displayed both on and off the Amazon site, increasing diversity and popularity as a place to advertise. When you think about it, it makes sense, the consumers being hit with Google and Facebook ads may not be ready to buy, however, on Amazon, they’re more likely prepared to purchase, which could mean more conversions for you or your clients. 

Dynamic Search Ads

Dynamic search ads (DSA) essentially help identify audiences you may not have thought of or didn't know existed, as well as optimise areas that your other ad campaigns may be suffering in. 

So how do dynamic search ads work? Well, Google does most of the work for you! Google will crawl your site and match a user’s search terms to your ad, based on the content shown on your website. 

Google then populates the headlines with relevant copy, as well as a link to the page. You can choose which page Google should focus on, or you can allow Google to crawl your whole website. 

Additionally, DSA will also show you keywords you may have missed out on, based on your website content. 

Less Organic Search

Since the beginning of 2019, organic search on Google has slowed down and produced fewer results. According to Merkle’s digital marketing report for Q2 2019, Google’s organic search results visits are down 8% with each year, totalling a 6% decrease overall. 

Organic visits through mobile phones dropped from 13% in Q1 2019 to 5% in Q2 2019. Data shows that paid search visits on phones could be cutting into organic visits. Phones and tablets produced 59% of organic search visits in Q2 2019, compared to 65% of paid search visits.

Voice Search in 2020

Although voice search hasn’t progressed as quickly as predicted, it still has massive potential and is why digital marketers should keep their eye on new improvements. 

• Strategy Analytics shows that consumers are purchasing smart speaker devices, growing by nearly 200% year-on-year.
• Globally, sales of smart speakers are expected to surpass $30 billion by 2024, with smart speakers becoming among the top-selling consumer electronic products (Source: Global Market Insights).
• 55 % of households are expected to own smart speaker devices by 2022 (Source: OC&C Strategy Consultants).

Demographic data suggests that 61% of 25-64-year-olds will use voice devices more in the future. (Source: PwC).

In conclusion, a lot is happening in 2020, and the technology on offer to us as digital marketers is only going to keep growing as the marketplace continues to improve. 

The ideas and technology surrounding AI and DSA are still developing and will only get better, but with that in mind, we need to proactively support the human element to ensure everything runs smoothly. 

Therefore as marketers, we need to embrace changes in the market, use technology and tools available to us but not lose sight of the importance of the human element, you can be sure your customers have not.