Being one of the fastest ways for drawing new visitors to a website, PPC marketing is also one of the most powerful tools for attracting a target audience and business development. Although it goes hand in hand with SEO marketing, the main difference is that it is not organic but paid. Therefore, it brings results almost instantly.
PPC marketing is an integral part of internet advertising. In order for your site to appear at the top of search results, you need to create an attractive ad using the keywords you are targeting, as well as to optimize it adequately. Before all other forms of traffic, PPC will result in conversions much faster.
To be(come) successful, every company needs to integrate PPC advertising into its brand strategy. Depending on your goals, to generate and nurture more leads through the sales process, investing in the platforms that will bring the most benefits shouldn’t be skipped.
Here are the 2021 trends in PPC advertising.
Using the Right Keywords in PPC Ad Campaigns
No need to mention that using relevant, high-quality keywords in your advertising campaigns helps you reach the right customers. Besides broad search terms, you should also take into consideration other types of keywords.
Long-tail queries make a huge portion of Google searches and are hugely valuable. Since they are more specific, they have lower search volume meaning that there’s less competition to rank in search results. And they cost less.
To prevent your ads from showing to people who are not interested in your products or services, it’s important to use negative keywords when creating paid ads. They help improve click-through rate (CTR), which ensures that ads only run against relevant queries, thus reducing the number of wasted clicks and lowering the bounce rate. Another way to avoid wasting money is by removing or tweaking underperforming keywords.
Voice Search PPC Optimization
Allowing people to search the Internet while on the go or doing some other tasks, searching by voice is becoming more and more popular. It is simpler, more accessible, and gives you more freedom while searching.
Voice search is based on a more natural search that comes down to everyday speech. It shifts the focus to longer phrases that have more search details. It is something that Google has been striving for both in search input and in ranking results, which makes optimizing ads for voice search a necessary part of marketing strategy.
When it comes to planning voice-search oriented PPC campaigns, keep these things in mind:
- Use aforementioned long-tail keywords to create a more natural, conversational style of ad
- Since people usually ask questions when using voice search, your ad should be in a form of a question as well
- Most of the voice search comes from mobile devices, so optimize your ad for smartphones.
Optimizing Landing Pages for PPC Ads
The difference between a click turning into a lead or bouncing from your site may lie in a well-designed landing page. Besides, it is a part of the overall custom brand design of your site. Unlike with organic traffic, with paid advertising, you get to choose where you want to direct visitors.
With the first click on your ad, a customer journey begins. This is the opportunity to raise awareness and interest, right before deciding to make a purchase. Having a landing page that provides a great user experience can be critical for getting a good CTR.
Optimizing your PPC landing page considers:
- Optimization for mobile searches
- Mobile-specific call-to-actions (CTA) like telling visitors to sign up for a webinar you’re hosting or a free online course
- Redirecting broken links
- Geotargeting ads
- Pages loading less than 3 seconds.
PPC Automation
Managing paid ad campaigns manually has become a tough task due to a large number of platforms and networks available. That is why PPC automation is changing the way of advertising management. It also plays a crucial role in A/B ad testing.
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) enables you to focus on more important tasks, while it tracks down the audience behavior regarding its interaction with ads. It can accurately create ads to improve the performance of your PPC campaign.
Other ways automation can impact your ad campaigns:
- Finding the best bidding strategy
- Creating bids to get the maximum number of conversions
- Improving your cost-per-click (CPC) by asking for ad auctions
- Tracking ad performance and stopping ads with poor performance
- Giving priority to the ads that generate the best results
- Generating ads using user behavior and website content
- Generating ad performance reports
- Generating ad data and creating copies of ads to generate the maximum number of clicks.
PPC Video Ads
Video has been considered the dominant content on social networks for years. Its use continues to grow so it is assumed that by 2022 there would be more than 1 million videos uploaded each second!
Compared to traditional, ads in video format provide more information to your audience. However, to be attractive to your audience, video ads should follow trends, be well-scripted, and last no longer than 8 minutes approximately, because that is the average attention span of an individual.
With more people staying at home due to remote work, TV and YouTube became the number one sources of entertainment. They’re actually merging, turning the TV screen into a fertile ground for PPC campaigns and thus reaching a larger audience. Of course, besides YouTube, this type of advertising can also be directed to other websites within the Google Display Network (GDN).
Whether it’s animated or true to life, consider working with a video production agency to get the most out of your PPC video ads.
Conclusion
These trends in PPC advertising will continue in 2022, with visual search possibly being the next big thing. With more and more people spending time in virtual reality, trying out the product in the virtual space before making a purchase will also be on the rise.
However, although the trends are changing, the essence of PPC marketing will remain the same: putting quality content in the center of an ad, using multiple platforms, and setting a realistic budget. Put your focus on the buyer’s journey and pick the fruits of your efforts.
