Predicting the future is never easy when it comes to PPC. If you consider the last one year, the paid advertising industry has seen a lot of developments from Google (18 updates in the last quarter of 2019 only), Facebook and Microsoft Advertising. As innovation continues to grow in PPC advertising, here are a few PPC trends that you should not ignore and be ready in 2020.
1. SMART SHOPPING CAMPAIGNS
Smart Shopping has improved considerably in recent times. If you are an e-commerce store, we would strongly recommend you to start running smart shopping campaigns. Agencies running shopping campaigns for e-commerce stores say that standard shopping campaigns have reached a saturation point, where whatever changes they make to optimize their campaigns do not have a considerable impact on the results.
PPC experts believe running Smart Shopping campaigns would initially be downtime and gradually give better results in the future. While planning for Smart Shopping campaigns, consider Search Ad campaigns to be a part of the marketing funnel; because Smart Shopping campaigns use the traffic from your ads account to identify your potential buyers and then show them your ads accordingly. If you feel that investing in Smart Shopping campaigns is a big risk, start with a small budget and analyze the results. Once a positive ROI is attained, you can think of increasing the advertising budget.
Smart Shopping campaigns, if properly implemented, combined with Google’s machine learning is the best way to go about showing shopping ads across various networks.
2. ADVANCED AUDIENCE SEGMENTATION
Audience segmentation is an effective grouping of people who have interacted with you online. It could be either on your website, your app, through your YouTube channel, your local stores or via social media platforms, etc.
The grouping is based on specific data points like age, gender, location (country, region or city-specific), their interaction with your website, their online purchase decisions (both current and past), brand loyalty, interests and habits, level of household income, where are they actively researching for you, which devices are they using and what keywords are they using to find you.
To grow your business, make sure to tap into each kind of interaction made and consolidate all these data points. Create audience lists, because based on these lists, you will be able to build rightly targeted and personalized ad campaigns.
3. USAGE OF DIFFERENT PPC PLATFORMS
While Google and Facebook own the majority of the market share, there are still plenty of advertising platforms such as Amazon, LinkedIn, Microsoft Advertising, Twitter, etc. which have revamped and revitalized to stay competitive with their counterparts. Having an “Omni-platform” approach and investing across a variety of different platforms makes sense as it allows you to identify new markets that you can use for your marketing funnel.
According to the different studies made, an average person will spend more than five years of his life browsing social media platforms. This is a huge change in user behavior and as an advertiser, it is your sole responsibility to leverage this opportunity by strategically running ads on different social platforms. All these platforms allow different types of audience targeting, so try to have a presence on relevant platforms and explore their advertising platforms accordingly.
For instance, if you are an e-commerce store, you should be on Amazon in particular, as people looking for your products on Amazon may have a higher intent to purchase your products. Even if they are just there to browse for specific items, you can create Amazon retargeting campaigns focusing on people who have interacted with your listings or have purchased your products in the past.
4. VIDEO ADVERTISING: THE NEXT BIG THING
Brands recently are pushing videos on several platforms to capture people’s attention. Following the trend, even you need to create a whole heap of short, sharp and to-the-point videos that get your message across before they hit the “Skip Ad” button. You can also upload 3-minute videos, which can be used as “Video Discovery Ads,” which gives a long explanation of the things that people might be searching for.
Putting in longer and highly engaging videos across a variety of different social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn can get you a good audience retention rate and a loyal follower base. A lot has been talked about Facebook Stories and it has been proven that Facebook video stories are very effective at selling products online. In 2020, we will see YouTube increase its market share drastically, so to be ahead in the game, you need to be in the game.
Now that you have an idea of the significant shifts in the PPC advertising industry, it is high time that you start preparing your strategy today.