Let’s face it, PPC marketing has dramatically evolved since its inception. With new features and improvements coming forth each year, the trends have kept changing and shaping the future of PPC.
While PPC trends in 2019 were all about paid audience targeting and remarketing, the new PPC trends will be a lot more about cutting-edge technology!
Keeping these amazing search marketing trends under your radar will not only help you save your budget but also automate your performance and keep a step ahead of the competition!
Excited? Let’s dig in!
The first and most important thing marketers have to consider in 2020 is automation and the role machine learning will play in PPC campaigns.
Google’s constant investment in artificial intelligence and with automation shown to drastically improve campaign performance, marketers foresee it to become the next big thing in PPC marketing.
Some even predict automation to completely take over manual bidding in the future (more on that later). With such rapid changes, businesses will be required to optimize their PPC strategies in favor of search engine algorithms.
This could mean defining the right audiences and keywords based on your audience’s intent, optimizing conversion tracking, and writing conversion-centric ad copies.
Long story short, PPC automation isn’t just another fad in PPC advertising.
Google, with tons of data at its disposal, can help you get more personalized with your advertising efforts. It can show your ads to relevant audiences and save you plenty of time for other strategies.
In the end, automation will let Google learn better about your marketing goals and help you drive good results.
The next trend that will be hot in 2020 is, you guessed it, video ads.
While it’s not kept secret that video content is DOMINATING the internet right now. In fact, research suggests that a website with video content tends to keep visitors hooked for longer than websites without videos.
So how can marketers leverage video ads for the campaigns?
Enter: YouTube Bumper Ads.
YouTube Bumper ads are a new form of ads released by YouTube that lets advertisers market their offerings under six seconds. These short videos appear before a YouTube video and give viewers a quick preview about a brand.
Touted as a new creative tool by YouTube, it could be a fantastic brand awareness option for businesses.
Marketers can either run these ads as full-fledged campaigns or in conjunction with TrueView Ads. They can be easily set up in Google ads much like other paid ad campaigns.
Considering the effectiveness of these ads, there’s no doubt more marketers will jump in the video marketing bandwagon and so should you.
Make sure you opt for a good video content marketing strategy before planning your PPC campaigns.
Another big thing marketers will have to pay attention to is audience targeting.
If you’re familiar with Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) you might be aware that it lets you deeply target your audience. From in-market audiences to affinity and audience targeting, Google has released a ton of options for search campaigns.
However, one amazing feature that marketers expect will drive PPC in 2020 is the ability to layer audience targeting on keywords.
What this means is you will be able to use demographic targeting and keyword targeting together in your campaigns.
Taking advantage of layered audience targeting will accurately help you display your ads to relevant people and thus save your PPC advertising management costs.
Till now PPC had only been associated with familiar names like Facebook and Google. However, with the growing popularity of online shopping and Amazon’s arrival in the advertising space, things are rapidly changing.
Today, Amazon is the third-largest known advertiser and offers businesses plenty of options to sell their products. Amazon’s ads are also diverse as they can appear both on and off Amazon.
With that being said, the growing trend of Amazon advertising and adoption for Amazon PPC management is expected to skyrocket even more in 2020.
This means if you’re an eCommerce business then alongside using Google and Facebook PPC ads, investing in Amazon PPC ads will be more crucial for your business growth.
You can start running Amazon PPC ads on your own or hire a dedicated Amazon PPC agency to do it for you. These agencies offer Amazon marketing services and can take care of the entire management on your behalf.
A crucial advantage of investing in Amazon PPC ads is their potential to drive more sales. Amazon compared to Google or Facebook has audience traffic that’s highly convertible, meaning people visiting Amazon are ready buyers with more chances of conversions.
Thus by running PPC ads on Amazon, you have the potential to drive more sales compared to Facebook or Google.
Still running your ads on Facebook or Google? It’s time to level up!
According to marketing experts, more people are spending their time on social media like Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, etc.
This means more people are discovering their next brand on these platforms and ignoring them for paid advertising would be a huge mistake.
As the trend of new social media platforms grows, so will the opportunity for advertising on these platforms grow too.
The rule of thumb here is to build a presence on these platforms and segregate your advertising budget for each platform. This will let you test the competition, allocate budget more wisely according to ad performance, and win more customers.
It’ll also be crucial to keep an eye on new updates and features released on these platforms, this will give you more room to experiment with your campaigns and stay ahead of the game.
Smart Bidding is a conversion-based automated bidding system that lets businesses optimize their PPC campaigns to get the desired results.
Smart Bidding uses machine learning to optimize conversions and can help you maximize anything from clicks to conversions and even enhance your CPC.
The goals Smart Bidding provides include Enhanced CPC (eCPC), Target Cost Per Acquisition (tCPA), and Target Return on Advertising Spend (tROAS).
With advancements in artificial intelligence, smart bidding is expected to take over manual bidding in the future. In 2020 and ahead, it’ll become even more powerful and more businesses will be using it for executing their PPC strategy.
As a business, it is recommended that you optimize your PPC campaigns with Smart Bidding for 2020.
One important trend you should definitely pay attention to is the growing competition in SERPs and the impact it will have on CPC costs.
Marketers have predicted that due to lack of search query growth the rise in CPC inflation is inevitable and will stay strong in the coming year.
While not something to be happy about, it’s certainly an eye-opener on why you should allocate your budget wisely in 2020.
By carefully adjusting your budget, you’ll stand a better chance of making the most of your PPC campaign.
Well, now that you know what will drive PPC in 2020, it’s time to start preparing your strategy accordingly.
By taking into account these seven PPC trends you’ll be able to make more informed decisions and stay ahead of your competitors with increased conversions and sales.
Not sure where to get started? We can also help you out.
We are a result-driven digital marketing agency that’s helped plenty of businesses drive sales using PPC campaigns. We offer a diverse range of solutions like Facebook Advertising, Google Search Ads, and also Amazon PPC Marketing to help businesses dominate their sales.
Get in touch with us and we’ll help you drive some sales.
