Table of Contents
Introduction
Paid marketing campaigns have been around for a fairly long time now. The fact that such campaigns actually contribute to the bottom line of a business proves that they are worth the investment. Recently, the big boys – Google, Microsoft, and Facebook – have launched updates to their advertisement features, which allow a tad more flexibility than the previous versions.
As a marketer, staying abreast with the latest trends in the consumer world is important. Also important is to know how to get your business noticed amidst these trends. In fact, for 74% of the businesses, PPC has become the main driver. If you haven’t already, the time is now to call up a PPC agency and set up your campaign.
Latest PPC Trends
80% of the search advertising volume comes through Google. This statistic makes it the top search advertisement platform today. Since a Pay Per Click campaign is innately a bid for the best keywords, the key to generating maximum ROI from this investment is to know where the current trends are going. A little research is all it takes to understand how the digital space is evolving to make space for businesses.
One of the notable changes that Google has recently introduced to its Ads platform is that it no longer supports Broad Match Modifier type keywords. Essentially, the search terms defined inside quotation marks, and those preceded by the plus symbol are now treated the same. While removing the repeated keywords would help in this situation, a more effective way would be to create a new ad campaign that follows the latest trends.
PPC Automation
Automation is the hot new loaf of bread in the bakery right now, and for all the right reasons. Process automation has made it possible to bring unprecedented levels of efficiency and time savings into business environments. Applying automation to certain aspects of PPC can help a business reach its marketing goals sooner and more effectively:
- Automating PPC strategy testing
- Monitoring ad performance to remove low-performing ads and boost the high-performing ones.
- Automation can also proactively generate ads based on how viewers are interacting with a business
- Develop and optimize a bidding strategy for the business for the best-ranking keywords.
Many more PPC processes can be automated successfully with the right assistance.
AI
As a far more technologically and digitally advanced implementation of automation, artificial intelligence has a little more to put on the table. As automation allows a brand to work with the data already available, artificial intelligence helps to chart and extrapolate it for future predictions. Leveraging AI to predict user behavior on a website can help brands tailor their marketing strategies accordingly. Additionally, AI can be effectively employed for CTR predictions, understanding the probability of a conversion, and PPC campaign optimization based on rising or falling events. In fact, AI can do more for PPC by analyzing the best bid to get maximum traffic on the website.
Video Advertising
It has been established through surveys that video marketing improves ROI – as claimed by 87% ofthe candidates surveyed. By introducing vertical video ads, Google has ensured that its viewers on mobile phones get a full-screen experience when viewing an ad. But how does this help PPC? Getting to embed your ad in one of the videos ensures its outreach to a wider audience. This is a new ad space that would witness a great level of competition. Businesses vying for it would need to revamp their video marketing campaigns. It wouldn’t only be about keywords now – but the entire content in general.
Voice Search
Just like the past couple of years have witnessed a boom in digitalization of services, the coming years will see a marked boost in voice search. Reports say that 50% of the consumers would be using voice search more often to shop online. This trend creates room for taking a minute to consider the kind of keywords your business is bidding for. Semantic optimization of all PPC campaigns would need to be carried out to be able to fully benefit from this trend. This future isn’t very far away, seeing how personal digital assistants on mobile phones are already quite efficient at understanding the search logic behind the keywords spoken by a human. These keywords are more like questions instead of being phrasal, which is what a campaign should be optimized for.
Virtual Reality
Virtual Reality is already being witnessed in gaming today, with gaming systems like HTC Vive. The technology at the core uses eye movements to track where a user is looking. If you think about it, this opens up a new avenue for advertisers. For PPC as well, to trigger an ad video or graphics to start playing, the eye movement of the viewer can be tracked. Its subtle pauses and direction changes can be programmed in to better calibrate the dynamics of a PPC ad in a VR system.
Smart Bidding
When designing an ad campaign that is highly focused on a singular goal, the concept of smart bidding can be leveraged effectively to achieve great ROI on PPC investments. Employing the power of machine learning to make calculated predictions on campaign performance, Google’s smart bidding system works really well to generate new leads, improve ROI, boost conversion rates, etc. You can even adjust your campaign to season-dependent fluxes, like the Holiday season.
Conclusion
Successful advertising is all about reaching out to the consumers in a way they find convenient and engaging. Leveraging the newest technologies above helps your business to squeeze the maximum returns on ad campaign investments. The most promising trend to change the way brands are found by consumers online is voice search, which has already penetrated rather well in the world. Set your business up with the challenge to revamp the PPC strategies.