The future of PPC

[Art Vandelay]

I was hoping to start a discussion here on the future of AdWords and paid advertising In general. With technology rapidly advancing, and with your expertise knowledge in this area, where do you estimate this field to be in 5 to 10 years from now? Automation seems to increase, more metrics become available, would there be radical changes coming to the PPC world?

It’s a fascinating field where a lot of success can be created for many people. Looking forward in hearing your thoughts

 

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[Andy Black]

I’ll tag @eliquid and @Phikey too. There’s other digital marketing specialists in here as well.

@Art Vandelay ... when you say PPC I presume you mean Paid Search? Do you specifically want to restrict the conversation to paid search?

 

[Art Vandelay]

I’ll tag @eliquid and @Phikey too. There’s other digital marketing specialists in here as well.

@Art Vandelay ... when you say PPC I presume you mean Paid Search? Do you specifically want to restrict the conversation to paid search?

Hi Andy,

Yeah paid search, managing campaigns, things related to this.

 

[eliquid]

I personally feel things will shift away from Cold audience tactics.

Less "pick a keyword and advertise for that" and more "what data do you have we can work with".

That doesn't mean I think keyword based targeting is going away, I just said a shift will happen away from that more when it comes down to results.

I also feel how a lot of 3rd party targeting is now, is what Google will end becoming. You know, hardly any levers you can pull and push and more vague "goals" than in tweaking things here and there.

When you look at how big Machine Learning and AI is getting, its only naturally these companies will use it more, which means less options for you, the end user and the ushering in of more "what data do you have to work with" I mentioned above.

 

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[Andy Black]

Like @eliquid says, Google is constantly eroding our visibility and control.

Keyword match types have been getting fuzzier over time. Exact match hasn't been exact match for years. Synonyms or close variants aren't of single words anymore, but can be for phrases (which is apparently why we showed for search term "mechanical" when we bid on keyword +mechanical +engineers ... argh!!).

Last year Google showed less search terms people used when they clicked on our ads. There was no valid explanation, so I can only assume it's so we don't see how fuzzy their matching becomes.

Recently I've noticed most people new to Google Ads go through the onboarding and create "smart campaigns". These give so little visibility and control that I don't use them and don't recommend people use them.

Lots of little changes over the years have resulted in advertisers having a little less control and getting bled a bit more by Google.

Mind you, they've also made the ads bigger over the years too. If you're in top ad positions above the organic results then you're doing better than before. I don't know what impact this has had on organic listings, or on the smaller advertisers who used to populate side ads.

Google would love a keywordless world where we enter our credit card details and point to a website and let them get on with it.

Google's trying to increase their revenue each quarter. I think they'll keep bleeding advertisers more and more until they eventually squeal too much and start taking their dollars elsewhere.

I am curious where the competitive advantage will be when everyone is forced to use the same "smart campaigns" and AI. As always, the winners will be that one step ahead.

Mobile is already massive obviously.

Video will continue to get bigger as more people watch them on mobiles.

It's not all doom and gloom. I can't imagine consumers suddenly not searching for (new) products or services online. Maybe in the future their fridge will do the search for the best priced milk just before they run out? Someone's going to need to set that up though. I can't imagine business owners not wanting to sell to new consumers either.

I'm still happy running paid search ads on Google. My style of more granular keywords, ads, and landing pages still works well against the competitors. I even get granular with dynamic search ads and Google Shopping ads.

I'm confident there's still money to be earned following in the wake of the likes of Google.

I personally find it all fascinating still. The changes that we have to contend with keep us on our toes and keep us searching for edges over the competition.

 

[Art Vandelay]

Wow interesting perspective and changes for sure. Really sounds like Google wants to start doing it all for you as long as you account is filled with $$$

Would we be looking at more complexity or more simplicity due to automation, AI etc in relations to paid traffic?

 

[Andy Black]

Would we be looking at more complexity or more simplicity due to automation, AI etc in relations to paid traffic?

My guess is it will change but stay the same. If it gets simplified because we’ve less levers to pull then it gets more complicated to differentiate. The street smart will still try to find an edge. I’m a believer that when the playing field is levelled the players just figure out different ways to play.

 

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[Phikey]

There are the classic ones like automation but something really interesting I'm seeing is Google taking extra steps to clean up the quality of advertisers.

With Amazon's explosive growth, Google needs to really work hard to make sure that people keep going to Google to do their shopping, rather than Amazon.

Part of this is making sure that the advertisers on their platform are delivering a quality experience for their customers. Yes, of course Google has their algorithm to make sure that the best advertisers get the best spots in organic and paid listings (through the use of the quality score for paid, for example). But even if they can rank well, if a customer gets burnt by a bad store, they're less likely to use Google to find their next products (and they might go to Amazon instead).

For example, check out this graph pulled from Google's Keyword Planner, looking up results for Google Merchant Center Suspensions.



You see this graph increasing over time, but take a big increase after June/July 2020.

This graph gives an indication for the amount of people being banned by Google on the Google Merchant Center platform which is required to run Google Shopping campaigns.

It's normal to see an increase last year (2020) due to a lot of people starting Ecom stores after losing their jobs and trying to make money online. But the huge increase after June is also likely to be caused by, in my opinion, Google cracking down on low quality stores. Google is suspending stores for not delivering a great buying experience for their customers. This means doing things like having a terrible refunds and returns policy and misleading/cheating customers (among other things).

Google has realized that these stores (that deliver a bad experience) actually harm the Google Search brand. Customers use google to find these stores (through Google Shopping), have a bad experience, and decide never to use Google to find a product again. Of course, where's that customer next going to go? Amazon, where the support is much better and there's a higher degree of trust because it's through a bigger (safer) platform.

Google has always used the quality score to grade the keywords in an account based on landing page experience, Expected CTR and Ad relevancy. I think this is going a step further and trying to encourage stores to provide a better experience beyond just the traffic.. but to the whole buying journey.

 

[Andy Black]

There are the classic ones like automation but something really interesting I'm seeing is Google taking extra steps to clean up the quality of advertisers.

With Amazon's explosive growth, Google needs to really work hard to make sure that people keep going to Google to do their shopping, rather than Amazon.

Part of this is making sure that the advertisers on their platform are delivering a quality experience for their customers. Yes, of course Google has their algorithm to make sure that the best advertisers get the best spots in organic and paid listings (through the use of the quality score for paid, for example). But even if they can rank well, if a customer gets burnt by a bad store, they're less likely to use Google to find their next products (and they might go to Amazon instead).

For example, check out this graph pulled from Google's Keyword Planner, looking up results for Google Merchant Center Suspensions.

View attachment 36268

You see this graph increasing over time, but take a big increase after June/July 2020.

This graph gives an indication for the amount of people being banned by Google on the Google Merchant Center platform which is required to run Google Shopping campaigns.

It's normal to see an increase last year (2020) due to a lot of people starting Ecom stores after losing their jobs and trying to make money online. But the huge increase after June is also likely to be caused by, in my opinion, Google cracking down on low quality stores. Google is suspending stores for not delivering a great buying experience for their customers. This means doing things like having a terrible refunds and returns policy and misleading/cheating customers (among other things).

Google has realized that these stores (that deliver a bad experience) actually harm the Google Search brand. Customers use google to find these stores (through Google Shopping), have a bad experience, and decide never to use Google to find a product again. Of course, where's that customer next going to go? Amazon, where the support is much better and there's a higher degree of trust because it's through a bigger (safer) platform.

Google has always used the quality score to grade the keywords in an account based on landing page experience, Expected CTR and Ad relevancy. I think this is going a step further and trying to encourage stores to provide a better experience beyond just the traffic.. but to the whole buying journey.

Yes, makes sense. Google has mostly been a search engine, where we click listings and go to other websites. They’ve been moving more towards being a directory where you click and stay on Google properties (Google My Business listings, flight bookings, etc).