PPC In 2017: Know What’s In Store For You

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At least 52 percent of people who click PPC advertisements end up calling the business. It’s no secret that a huge number of entrepreneurs and large companies prefer investing in PPCs to traditional website banners. The PPC advertisement manager enables businesses to customize their advertisements using popular keywords, age, geographical location, and hobbies. In 2016, the annual paid search advertising industry raked in 35 billion dollars. This figure is equivalent to California’s State education annual expenditure in 2016.

In the quest for total dominance in the paid search advertising industry, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Bing frequently introduce new updates that transform the overall advertising experience. Here we bring you the 10 major trends and changes that have rocked the PPC advertising industry in 2017.

Smart Display Campaigns

Machine learning is the current trend, wherein a software or web application uses complex algorithms to understand an end user’s tastes, in order to display relevant advertisements. Facebook and Twitter have benefited from increased advertising revenues, and positive feedback from businesses that subscribe to their marketing services. Another benefit of using machine learning is that it provides comprehensive data analysis reports within minutes.

Google launched the Smart display campaigns system in April 2017. The Smart display campaign system gives companies a wider reach at lower costs, thanks to the Google Display Network. This network comprises of 3 million applications and websites affiliated with Google. The Smart display campaign system identifies prospective clients based on machine learning analysis, and displays unique image and native ads. The autopilot system makes sure you get the best bidding rates when you’re offline.

In March 2017, Google announced a new AdWords update concerning keywords. Businesses using Smart display campaigns can now receive additional exposure for variations of their targeted keywords.

Introduction of Google Attribution

In 2001, Google introduced Conversion tracking to allow advertisers to observe the series of events that happen after someone clicks an advertisement. A separate column named “Converted Clicks” displayed the number of clicks that it takes to make a purchase. Converted Clicks determined the click rates awarded to advertisers when bidding for new keywords. However, Google decided to withdraw Converted Clicks in March 2017, since they offered no insight on the actual conversion process.

Google Attribution burst onto the paid search-advertising scene in May 2017 as a replacement to the extinct Converted Clicks. Advertisers using Google Attribution are able to gauge conversion rates between mobile gadgets and computers, unlike Converted Clicks, which treated all internet-enabled devices equally. It also analyzes an advertisement’s performance on the Google Display Network. This feature lets advertisers identify weak areas in their sales funnels.

Google Attribution works by fetching all information relevant to your advertisement from sources such as Google Analytics, AdWords, and DoubleClick Search.

Ads Added by AdWords

After carrying out intensive AdWords performance research in 2016, Google launched Ads added by AdWords in January 2017. Ads added by AdWords began as a pilot program involving 2,000 advertisers, who set their advertisement rotation settings to either “Optimize for Conversions” or “Optimize for clicks”. This feature works by adding machine learning-generated text-based advertisements to existing AdWords campaigns. Google believes that Ads added by AdWords can improve an advertisement’s performance by up to 15 percent.

Ads added by AdWords is an optional feature, but most expert online marketers are of the view that it enables novice advertisers to capitalize on additional keywords. On the other hand, some business owners think the results produced by Ads added by AdWords interfere with advertisement copy testing.

Green Ad Label Replaces the Solid Green Background

Have you noticed the green web links that appear under the blue AdWords headlines? Google released this new update in February 2017 to help people distinguish between organically produced search results, and paid advertisements for targeted keywords. The green web links contain the label ‘Ad’. Google’s AdWords department carried out a survey shortly after releasing the new update, and discovered an improvement in ad viewing.

A month prior to the Green Ad Label release, Google tested it in the United Kingdom. The February release was due to the fact that most end users reported they were able to distinguish advertisements from regular websites on their smartphones and tablets. This was a major challenge when Google was using the solid green background in 2016.

Updates to Dynamic Search Ads

Dynamic Search Ads simply consisted of headlines and landing pages. Things changed for the better in March 2017 when Google decided to include text-based advertisements alongside Dynamic Search Ads. This feature lets advertisers add useful product or service information to entice potential customers to click advertisements. It also allows advertisers to effectively incorporate keywords in their advertisements to boost SEO.

In addition, advertisers now have access to a new feature called Page Feeds. It has a column for Page URL, and another one for Custom Labels. This new feature allows advertisers to select specific landing pages for new advertisements. You can include newly released products and services by choosing the option “Use URLs from both Google's index of my website and my page feed."

Advertisers have been able to add extra information and stronger call-to-action statements to their Dynamic Search Ads, thanks to the introduction of an additional description line. The new feature supports 80 characters, and appears below the “Description” form. Advertisers won’t have to pay anything extra to use this additional description line.

Are you wondering how to use the additional description line to gain SEO mileage for your PPC advertisement? Hire a competent and experienced AdWords campaign manager at freelancer.com.

Global Availability of Call-only Advertisements

A call-only advertisement contains call-to-action statements that persuade potential customers to call the phone number displayed in the advertisement’s header. The business name appears right next to the phone number in blue font.  Call-ads have better conversions compared to normal PPC advertisements, because potential customers can get in touch with the business much faster than sending an email.

Google began displaying the business names, together with phone numbers on call-only ad’s headlines, in 2016. After taking time to observe how both advertisers and customers responded, the AdWords department made this update permanent.

Availability of In-market Audiences Feature for AdWords Clients

An in-market audience refers to potential clients, who are displaying purchase intent signals. Google determines purchase intents based on the search queries associated with high conversion rates.  It also uses Google Analytics in this scenario. Let’s assume you search “affordable Italy summer vacation packages”, and then visit a couple of websites that appear in the search results. AdWords will keep track of the websites you visit and the search queries you use, leading until the conversion point.

Google made in-market audiences feature available for AdWords search campaigns in May, during the Google Marketing Next.

Bing Releases New Shopping Campaign Updates

Microsoft realized while purchasing online, customers use numerous keyword variations for searching various products. This observation led to the release of the Product Search Term Report in April, to enable advertisers to view all the search queries customers used to spot and buy items. It also shows the level of accuracy of your products’ description in relation to the popular search queries in your industry.

Customers get annoyed after realizing they have to wait for the availability of a product. Bing came to the rescue by launching the inventory update feeds. Business owners can use this feature to display stock quantity and price lists.

Historical Score data for AdWords Clients

AdWords added four new columns in the Quality Score section to help businesses view the overall performance of their paid-per-click advertisements. Business owners now have access to new information such as Expected Click-Through-Rates, Ad Relevance, and Landing Page Experience.

Bing Launches New Mobile Campaigns Bidding Rates

Nowadays, mobile web browsers have the capacity to display PPC advertisements. It’s no secret that many more people access the internet via smartphones and tablets, compared to those relying on conventional computers. Bing launched new PPC rates for the smartphone and tablet market segment in June to enable businesses to create affordable mobile-optimized advertisements.

Conclusion

You can experience significant improvement in your PPC advertisements by first learning how these PPC changes work. Taking advantage of these updates will let you identify new keywords before you create compelling product descriptions for better conversions.

Do you have a comment or question on this topic? Feel free to post them in the comments section.

Posted 27 September, 2017

LucyKarinsky

Software Developer

Lucy is the Development & Programming Correspondent for Freelancer.com. She is currently based in Sydney.

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