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4 PPC Trends You Can’t Afford to Scroll Past
2020 has been the year of unpredictability. But as online advertising has become increasingly crowded and competitive, anticipating your customers’ behavior is more important than ever. You want to get the most out of your ad budget, and that means knowing who to target right and what will make them engage. If you’re looking to revamp your pay-per-click campaigns in 2020, here are 4 trends you can’t afford to scroll past.
Embrace PPC Automation
Pay-per-click automation has emerged as a new powerhouse in improving campaign performance — so much so that it is believed that the automation industry will generate up to $238 billion in revenue across the globe by 2021.
For those of you who don’t know, here’s how it works: PPC automation uses machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) technology to identify the best possible audiences for your campaigns, helping eliminate the manual, tedious tasks of Google and Bing Ads. These features save you a lot of time and money, but it doesn’t mean you want to be completely hands-off either. By setting up accurate conversion tracking, writing effective ad copy and identifying target audiences and keywords, you can assist the algorithms in the learning process and ensure you’re getting the best results.
While automation in PPC isn’t new, it’s stepping up big time in different aspects of the advertising process, such as:
- Creating and optimizing ad copy
- Setting bids to achieve as many conversions as possible at a certain CPA (cost per action)
- Enhancing CPC (cost per click) by finding ad auctions that will generate more conversions
- Finding performance issues
- Pausing ads that aren’t performing
- Generating automatic ad performance reports
Take Advantage of Artificial Intelligence
Yep, AI technology is at it again, so let us dig a little deeper in the details. How exactly does AI benefit PPC? There are a few main ways:
- Identifying the bids that are going to drive the most traffic
- Predicting the CTR (click-through rate) of future ads
- Calculating the impact it will have on quality scores
- Using historic data to predict likelihood of a conversion
The result of each capability is a much more effective campaign with a lot less effort on your end. As AI continues to study and learn your audiences’ behavior, the more highly-targeted your ads will be, boosting your PPC performance BIG time.
Make Video a Must-Have
2019 was a huge year for video, and it’s only on track to get bigger with 82% of all consumer internet traffic predicted to come from video by 2022 (Cisco). Display ads always tend to get significantly more clicks than text ads because people like to see what they’re really getting before making a purchase. So, search engine marketers who aren’t providing a video experience are already behind those who do.
Video is not only super easy to consume and engage with, but it’s also not that difficult (or expensive) to create anymore. You don’t need a big budget to create an effective video; instead there’s so many ways to get the same benefits without the long production process — like stop motion graphics, animations and scroll overs. They should already be part of your website and ad strategies, but check out how you can also incorporate these same interactive elements to your email campaigns.
Join the Smart Bidding Evolution
Smart bidding is another machine-learning tool, but its special task is to control ad bidding. As a subset of automated bidding, it allows you to optimize ads for conversions and conversion values for every auction dependent on the goals you have set. Some examples out there include Enhanced Cost-Per-Click (CPC), Target Return on Advertising (ROAS), and Target Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA).
At the pace smart bidding is growing in power and prevalence, we may see manual bidding eventually disappear altogether. But it’s no reason to get upset as making the switch will only allow marketers to focus on strategy and analytics instead. It’s time to hop on board the evolution now, so you’re more than ready for the future.
PPC strategies are constantly changing, and in order to be competitive, you need to keep up. Lucky for you, Assemble is here to help. To learn more about bringing your digital ad campaigns to the next level to maximize your marketing efforts, contact us today.