Top 10 PPC Trends for 2020

PPCtrendsfor2020
The landscape of digital advertising will be more dynamic in the year 2020 than ever before. Pay-per-click advertising, also popularly known as the cost per click (CPC) advertising, is a form of digital advertising wherein, an advertiser pays the publisher, commonly the search engines or website owners to drive traffic on their websites, whenever an ad is clicked on. Read more: Pay-Per-Click & Why You Need It Today Marketers need to keep abreast of the evolving PPC trends in all the spheres of digital advertising – from paid searches to remarketing & from paid social to the strategies for multichannel attribution. Promotional tactics for online businesses & the process of acquiring new leads are anticipated to reach entirely new avenues in the year 2020. Consequently, PPC marketers will need to reshuffle their marketing strategies & train themselves to sustain amidst the evolving marketing trends. According to a report by Quartz cutting down on the traffic acquisition costs (TAC) has always been a challenge for businesses. If the PPC strategy in 2019 was dominated primarily by audience targeting & automation, a lot more can be expected in the coming year. To keep pace with the newest PPC trends for 2020, marketers need to align their PPC goals with the bigger picture of the dynamic digital advertising domain as a whole, including taking better efforts at audience targeting.

The PPC trends 2020: Gearing Up for the New Dawn in Digital Marketing

Digital advertising is an ever-evolving field. PPC advertising is a form of digital advertising that’s inevitable for the modern marketing landscape. Not only the PPC advertising is cheaper & delivers impressive results, but the results also can be tracked, split-tested & optimized. Furthermore, PPC advertising can give marketers some competitive advantage in improving their organic campaigns.
A  2019 Global Digital Ad Trends study concluded that digital advertising single-handedly drove the expansion in total media ad spend across the globe, majorly influencing the paid search trends.
As the evolution of PPC advertising continues, let’s delve into for amassing some precognitive insights for paid search trends in 2020:

1)  The amalgamation of Google’s Smart Bidding with Automated Features:

Smart bidding is a part of automated bid strategies that use machine learning algorithms to optimize conversions with every auction. The feature is known as “auction time bidding” Some of the smart bidding strategies are Target CPA, Target ROAS, and Maximize Conversions & Enhanced CPC. There are four primary benefits of smart bidding: a) Gaining predictive insights: machine learning algorithms train on data & help the marketers make intelligent predictions on how different bids can influence website conversions. b) Insights on the Manual bid adjustments: Auction-time bidding helps in deriving a wide array of signals that lead to the optimization of the bids. Signals are the recognizable attributes about a person or about their context at the time of a particular auction. The attributes also include devise & location which are the bids that can be manually adjusted. c) Setting Performance Controls: Setting performance targets as per the unique business goals of the brands, is a unique feature of automated biddings. The search bids can be optimized according to selected attribution models & as per the data-driven insights.  The device-specific performance targets can be set up for mobile desktop as well as a tablet with Target CPA bidding. d) Ease of Reporting: Smart bidding offers reporting tools. Analyzing the bidding reports gives the marketers deeper insight into the bidding performance & can help troubleshoot any underlying issues. The following are the advantages of using smart bidding reporting tools:
  • A detailed bid strategy to dissect every activity happening under your bidding process
  • Campaigns are drafted & experiments are executed for Search & Display campaigns
  • Bid simulators predict the number of conversations that your ads might have received
  • Alerts flag issues with conversion tracking & provide steps into fixing them
PPC requires time & patience once executed. Marketers can only see the benefits of the newly automated Google Ad Features after a while. Test-running the automated features of Google helps in figuring out whether that strategy is apt for a particular campaign. Aaron Levy, Group Director, SEM, Tinuiti, states the year 2020 as a year of automation refinement: “They want to make sure that us advertisers are set up for success, for growth and to devote our headspace to strategy rather than pushing buttons,”… “All aided by the help of great data.” Invest time to learn the automated strategies provided by Google. Test run only a single automated strategy at a time whether bids or recommended ad copy or responsive search ads.

2) Automation meets Artificial Intelligence:

The business companies these days are increasingly investing in intent data to gain insights into their people’s behavior. According to Emailmonday, more than 51% of companies are using marketing automation & more than 58% of the companies are planning to adopt it. Data intelligence is further deployed into action. With the help of automation systems working on the principles of artificial intelligence & machine learning, Google can offer advertisers highly targeted audiences. According to a report by WebEngage, the Marketing Automation Software market is anticipated to grow at 8.55%, unlocking the market capitalization worth USD 6.4 billion by 2024. With automation & artificial intelligence, search & social are all coming together. The year 2020 will be a year of channel integration in PPC advertising. Michelle Morgan, Director of Client Services at Clix Marketing states: “If you are not looking to the news channels in the coming year, you’ll miss out on new business.  Artificially intelligent systems are rapidly evolving to suffice the requirements of niche-specific as well as cluster-specific audience targeting.

3) Increase in the Use of Video Ads & Video Content:

 People are increasingly consuming videos on social media. Videos are important to narrate stories. A report by Smart Insights concludes that 83% of marketers believe that videos are becoming increasingly important for brands & more & more brands are likely to assimilate it into their digital marketing strategies. According to a report by impactbnd.com, 72% of businesses stated that videos have improved their conversion rate. Videos are the most effective way of visual storytelling & amongst customers’ most preferred ways to learn about new products or services. Video marketing will continue to be the most important marketing trend for the next 5 – 10 years. According to research by Roarwebdesign, when learning something new, millennials are 2.7 times more likely to watch a YouTube video compared to reading a book. Advertising on YouTube is an easy, cost-effective & an operative method to serve your products or services in front of targeted prospects.   Video advertising is amongst the most convenient PPC trends for 2020.

4) Expect Fewer Organic Results on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs):

According to a report by WordStream, Google has reduced the ideal 10 search listings to 7 on over 18% of their searches. According to Cardinal Digital Marketing, internet users are satisfied with the first three pages of search engines. Some experts anticipate that Google will start to show fewer results for the search of individual users. This trend is quite anticipated because more than 50% of Google searches end without being clicked. According to a report by report by the Search Engine Land Zero-click, searches were at an all-time high in June. So, if your content is not of a highly qualified to feature in the organic searches, you will have to invest in PPC advertising.

5) Use Optimized & Highly Specific Landing Pages:

Customer success & customer relationship management are the absolute imperatives of the modern digital economy driven by subscriptions & dwelling on the shoulders of several inbound methodologies to impart knowledge to the customers. Jeff Allen, President, Hanapin Marketing states that search queries wouldn’t grow dramatically. Therefore, optimizing the landing pages can give you the desired results from your PPC endeavors. Jeff argues: “The SERPs will continue to rise until we reach a saturation point, a point that the next click is no longer profitable.” As the research methodologies of the buying prospects have transcended across multiple channels, the Google ad trends have evolved. One of the most valuable PPC trends for 2020 is to implement highly specific landing pages. This assures customer success because of the following factors:
  • There is an increased probability for the prospects to convert or take the desired action for conversion when the page they land on is relevant to what they have been looking for
  • Google Ads reward relevance, the more alignment between your ads & landing pages, the lesser is the price to pay-per-click.

6) Better Audience Targeting:

Modern business brands need to strategically speak to their target audiences at multiple touch-points through targeting & retargeting. Greg Finn, Digital Marketer & partner, Cypress North, describes the targeting as an evolutionary PPC trend for 2020: “Instead of cramming a marketing message in the face of others, advertisers need to worry less about the direct sale, and more about how our offerings can help others.” Alongside the evolution in the targeting of the keywords, the audience targeting trends will also evolve.

7) GDPR & First-Party Intent Data:

Generation data Protection Regulation imposed by the European Union & similar legislation across diverse geographies made privacy a norm, marketers need to take care of while executing their PPC campaigns. Tim Jensen, Campaign Manager, Clix Marketing describes this as “getting the messaging on point for the right audience…tracking the top-level ROI metrics that matter to the business’ bottom line.” Unless the marketers aren’t prepared to abide by all the legislative norms prioritizing the data security of the clients, achieving 100% multi-channel attribution can be a daunting task.

8) Deploying the Updated PPC Strategies in 2020:

Expect automation to get rid of some of the monotonous PPC marketing tasks which mean that marketers can focus on more strategic thinking for deploying refined PPC strategies & coming up with intelligent PPC updates in 2020. Amy Bishop, Owner & Digital Marketing Consultant, Consultative says: “In a changing landscape, the strategy only ever becomes more & more valuable.”

9) Watch Out for The Alternative Advertising Platforms:

Marketers need to look beyond the horizon of traditional marketing platforms such as Google & Facebook & start thinking about the majorly untapped social media channels such as Reddit & even TikTok. Brands will need to go where their audiences are in 2020. Duane Brown, Founder & Head of Strategy, Take Some Risk puts this as: “If your audience is on one of the ad platforms above then you should at least test it out and see if you can make it work for your business.” It can be expected that the budget allocation for diverse advertising platforms will also be amongst the most important PPC trends for 2020.

10) Shifting Focus to Brand Affinity & Awareness:

Branding will reach entirely new heights in 2020. Not only familiarizing potential customers to the brands will be important but how customers experience & response to their brands’ visions will also be important. Jonathan Kagan, VP for Search at Cogniscient Media states: “Advertisers can no longer allow the platforms to ‘do their things’. They need to continue to police your ad placements that are operating on automation. Otherwise, you may appear that your brand is supporting a horrific event.” It will be safe to assume that branding can return in the arena of digital advertising in 2020 & will be amongst the important PPC trends to watch out for in 2020.

Wrap Up

From the execution of fully automated AI-driven PPC ad campaigns to audience-based targeting to lack of SERP space to monetize content, the year 2020 will be studded with extreme action for the PPC advertisers. Evolving PPC trends will revolutionize the arena of digital advertising & they are all happening in real-time, as we speak & talk about them. Staying abreast with the latest & real-time marketing trends can be beneficial for PPC advertisers as it will help them collect diverse intent-based insights about the prospects’ behavioral data & their adaptability indexes with evolving PPC trends in 2020. Use the trends enlisted above to effectively target your audiences & grow your revenues & other core business bottom lines. Valasys Media is amongst the most effective B2B service providers & we leverage services such as lead generation, account-based marketing, lead nurturing, event promotion services, list building services & content syndication services. Our customer-centric services & shared wisdom leveraging influential B2B research help our clients to lead the much-needed changes to achieve their business bottom-lines.

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