There are several PPC trends to watch for in 2020. PPC trends focus on automation and machine learning for improved ad performance and efficiency. Voice search optimization becomes crucial as voice-activated device usage rises. Audience targeting is refined, prioritizing user intent over keywords. Video ads gain prominence across platforms. Visual search evolves, offering new advertising opportunities. Advertisers increasingly adopt these trends, adapting to changing technologies and consumer behaviors for effective PPC campaigns.
Over the last year-and-a-half, we’ve seen developments occurring in the paid search industry from both Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising. So far, the changes have involved audiences, average position, smart bidding, and ad copy.
As innovation in digital marketing continues to grow exponentially, smart pay-per-click pros need to be able to keep up with the market.
To stay ahead of the game, here are five trends we are on the look for in 2020.
Voice Search
Comscore predicts that by next year, half of all searches will be voice searches. The search terms that trigger ads that will appear will change as people interact with the search engines more conversationally when they use their voice-enabled devices.
Though we are still quite a long way away from seeing paid search within voice, there’s no reason you shouldn’t start preparing for it now. You can do this by:
- Beginning to use more conversational and long-tail keyword terms you are targeting
- Keeping your landing pages more conversational for the user experience and SEO reasons
- Testing and learning more Long Trail terms in 2020. Focus on the impression and impression share, as well as the CTR and CVR.
Account Management and Automation
We’ve already seen automation start, but we’re going to see it become even more crucial in 2020.
We’ve seen automation in PPC optimization and account management. The ability to identify opportunities within your PPC account and make changes to improve performance and account hygiene is now automated. When it comes to account management, you can automate rules within your account to manage the bidding and daily account management tasks.
Though it’s a good start, there’s not enough automation in the industry. Automating processes such as big management can help harness the power of automation. Even if you are not too keen on the idea of automating bid management, there are many other areas you can apply automation to.
For example, Albert is an AI tool that takes data from across all of your marketing activities to decide where your investment should be focusing. There are moment marketing tools like Mporium that allow marketers to automate changes to their campaigns based on triggers from third-party sources such as social media content, weather, stock market changes, and TV.
In 2020, we’ll see even more attention placed on marketing performance with businesses and clients requiring additional data analysis, reporting, planning, and servicing. As more companies advertise online, it will become increasingly challenging to cut through the clutter.
Because of the higher prominence of automation tools to help with optimization, account management, daily tasks, and reporting, you should start looking into ways you can use automation in your paid search, such as:
- Using scripts in Bing and Google to automate your account management alerts and changes
- Testing smart campaigns in Google ads to hit your target KPIs
- Reduce manual reporting time with automated reporting
- Rely on bidding rules to manage campaign performance
- Set up alerts across all of your activities to find out about significant changes
- Spend more time analyzing your audiences and data so you can deliver the best possible experience for your customers
Audience Segmentation
Audience segmentation is based on taking a group of people who have interacted with you online, either on your website, through a YouTube channel, your CRM, or another social media channel.
You segment the audience based on the URL they visited on your website, how they’ve interacted on your site, and the videos they’ve watched.
You place them into buckets that serve specific ads based on how they’ve interacted with you. This allows you to increase or decrease bids to make sure you are more or less prominent to the audiences based on the value they have to your business. Though it seems very in-depth, this is still among the most basic ways to use audiences.
As we gather more data on our customers and audiences, we can break them up into specific buckets and thereby personalized are messaging and visiting strategies even more based on certain data points, such as:
- What demographic group they fall under
- Age and gender
- The type of user they are
- Their interests
- What devices they are on
- How they came to your website and what keywords they found you through
Including specific data sets as well as inferred emotional data allows you to make your ads extremely personalized toward the people you want to target. You can also identify the type of person you should be spending your resources on to grow your business. You can create audience lists in Google Ads to make use of this opportunity.
Visual Search
Search is not only becoming possible without a screen, but it is also becoming more visual. Now it’s possible to upload an image to a search engine and use it to find relevant results based on other images similar to the one you uploaded. This development started in the social media world with Pinterest and its visual search tool in 2015. Since then, both Snapchat and Instagram have also allowed users to search with images.
Last year, Snapchat announced a visible search partnership with Amazon to allow users to search for products on Amazon straight from their Snapchat camera.
In response, Bing has also released its own visual search engine that allows people to do the same thing with their entire and Ducks of the web rather than just what’s available on a social media platform or retail website.
Preparing for the growth of visual search now will make it easier for you in the future. Do this by:
- Ensuring you have plenty of images that showcase what you offer on your site
- Fine-tuning the ALT text of these images have the correct alt text to allow the search engines to pick them up
- Ensuring you’re using only the best quality images to Showcase your products and services.
- Where possible, using multiple images, so the bots have a choice of what images to index.
PPC and SEO Integration
As we move forward, it’s essential to address the relationship between PPC and SEO. Both of them have their pros and cons, but you can use them together to get the most of your results.
In 2020, you can make an effort to integrate your PPC and SEO strategies with:
- Efficient position strategy
- Keyword unearthing
- Increased SERP coverage
- Data and information sharing
What do you think the next few years will bring in terms of PPC? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
