If your business is focusing on using pay-per-click ads to supplement your incoming leads and new customers, you certainly understand what a competitive space the digital marketplace is today. With a crowded organic space, paid ads can be just the ticket to help elevate your company higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs) to attract new business.
Google’s search engine has major algorithm updates and changes all the time, with five or six core updates each year and more minor ones every day. But what about the trends within pay-per-click ads? What methods will work well for the upcoming year to help maximize your ad spend dollars and result in more efficient leads and loyal customers? Read below for some trends you can employ in your PPC campaigns for cost-effective, productive ads.
Smart Bidding
Smart bidding has become incredibly efficient in recent years. If your paid ads campaign isn’t employing a strategy that involves smart bidding, it could be falling behind your competitors.
Bidding strategies have evolved past just maximizing clicks to generate leads. As Google’s AI has evolved, it is much better at predicting user behavior from search history of users and those who have already interacted with your business and those in similar industries. Smart bidding strategies such as Maximizing Conversions with Target CPAs or setting a Target ROAS (return on ad spend) can help Google best spend your budget. These are key to maximizing efficiency and reducing budget wasted on clicks that are less likely to proceed through the sales funnel into a worthwhile lead or customer for your business.
Understanding Value Of Leads
The best trends sometimes can be the tried-and-true ones. That is absolutely evident in businesses understanding some of the basics of their leads and customer base. Google’s AI is continually getting better at understanding more context around searches on its platform. The Google Ads interface has also been making it easier to enter contextual data about your business so it can learn best where to serve ads.
If your business has a major sales performance management software, there’s a chance it could be integrated with Google Ads to import anonymous data points that can help the system learn more about your core customer base, and therefore serve good ads to people that are most likely to convert.
Additionally, take advantage of the various inputs like conversion value to give signals to Google on what type of leads are the best for your business. Assign dollar values to phone calls, form submissions or other types of conversions to show which bids and conversions to prioritize more than others. Are mobile users more valuable than those on desktop? That prioritization is customizable, too, so your business is using its ad spend more efficiently.
Try New Ad Types
If your business has engaged in Google Ads in recent years, you likely did most of your advertising via Expanded Text Search Ads. One of the most notable items of 2022 is that Google phased out that type of ad and stopped allowing those to run in June. This basic type of ad is best left in the past, though, as Google has developed much broader and effective ad types to choose from.
The most common replacement for Expanded Text Ads is the Responsive Search Ad. RSAs offer more headline and description options and allow for more programmability for location and service to more keywords.
To diversify your ad serving and capture a higher market share, consider adding different types of ads and compliment your existing targets. Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) are incredibly valuable in that they capture targeting related to your web content and searches that the account administrator may have missed. While your attempt is to be as thorough as possible, often search habits change faster than the data can tell you to manually adjust it. DSAs help make up that gap in your ad serving on the search network. Display Ads are important for serving on website ad space, videos and other articles online. This can help capture users on sites related to your business and videos about services or products you offer, different than search ads where there is some more initiative from the end-user to see the ad in the first place. Local Search Ads are relatively new to the Google Ads realm, helping serve ads specifically to local service searches that show up in maps and in Google’s new “screened” ads section for certain industries.
In Summary
Google’s Ads platform is evolving as fast as many other parts of the web, so it’s important to keep up on what can make a difference for your business for the better and rise above the competition. DigitalParc’s PPC experts are ready to manage your ads campaigns and help your business thrive. Our experienced pay-per-click team has more than 10 years of working with Google Ads, as well as other online ad portals, so we have the background to effectively give your ads the best shot of succeeding with users. We have also been recognized by Expertise.com among the Best Pay-Per-Click Agencies in Minneapolis in 2022.
Contact DigitalParc today at 612-845-5590 or fill out our form for your digital advertising needs!
