10+ Huge PPC Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2019

2018 was anoth­er huge year in the world of PPC marketing.

We saw mas­sive changes at Google, such as AdWords being rebrand­ed as Google Ads; the new Google Ads “expe­ri­ence” (i.e., inter­face); and the launch of numer­ous new cam­paign types, fea­tures, enhance­ments, tar­get­ing options, and tools.

Mean­while, at Bing Ads, we saw the launch of tons of new fea­tures, tar­get­ing capa­bil­i­ties, reports and oth­er improve­ments – but the most excit­ing news was that we (final­ly!) saw the arrival of LinkedIn pro­file targeting.

We also saw the rise of Ama­zon as a poten­tial­ly seri­ous chal­lenger to Google, with adver­tis­ers shift­ing bud­get toward Ama­zon because more peo­ple now begin their search for prod­ucts on Ama­zon than Google.

So what does 2019 have in store for PPC marketers?

I asked 28 of the smartest PPC peo­ple I know to find out!

Last year (see 25 Experts on the Big PPC Trends You Need to Know in 2018) some of the hot trends includ­ed arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, voice search, audi­ence tar­get­ing, and automation.

In 2019, though, clear­ly two trends are on just about everyone’s minds: Audi­ences and automation.

But that’s just the beginning.

Here are 10 of the biggest trends you need to know for 2019 – cov­er­ing paid search, paid social, and remar­ket­ing – accord­ing to 28 of the top PPC mar­ket­ing experts.

1. Audiences, Not Keywords

Aaron Levy of Elite SEM believes 2019 will be the year the key­word dies, as adver­tis­ers shift focus away from match types and terms toward con­text and people.

“It’s been a long time com­ing; search engines have giv­en us too many addi­tion­al levers to han­dle along with key­words,” Levy said. “I believe next year will the begin­ning of the end for key­words as a pri­ma­ry search lever.”

Not all are quite ready to declare the key­word dead, includ­ing Andrew Lolk of SavvyRev­enue. If you aren’t using audi­ences, you’re doing PPC wrong, he said.

“Key­words will be impor­tant, but audi­ence-tar­get­ing on the search net­work will in 2019 be of equal impor­tance for secur­ing high per­for­mance,” Lolk said.

Christi Olson, Head of Evan­ge­lism for Search, Microsoft, isn’t ready to declare the key­word dead, either.

“But what will con­tin­ue to sep­a­rate the best-in-class search mar­keters from the aver­age Joes will be how audi­ence data is are seg­ment­ed and imple­ment­ed via an audi­ence tar­get­ing strat­e­gy,” she said. “The key to suc­cess in 2019 and beyond will be to cre­ate a detailed strat­e­gy of the var­i­ous audi­ence types and audi­ences lists and how you can lay­er them (with pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive bid types) to shape your paid search strategy.”

Pur­na Vir­ji, Senior Man­ag­er of Glob­al Engage­ment, Microsoft, sug­gests spend­ing more time focus­ing on cre­at­ing and opti­miz­ing your cus­tomer segments.

“Drill down in them even fur­ther, so your ad mes­sag­ing can be as rel­e­vant and feel as per­son­al­ized as pos­si­ble,” she said. “This will be huge­ly impor­tant in 2019!”

Brooke Osmund­son, Senior Dig­i­tal Man­ag­er, NordicClick Inter­ac­tive, thinks audi­ences and key­words will still work hand-in-hand in 2019, not­ing that “this will be vital to learn what types of audi­ences are actu­al­ly search­ing for your prod­ucts and services.”

“In-Mar­ket audi­ences have proven to be effec­tive [in 2018], and uti­liz­ing remar­ket­ing based off of top-fun­nel in-mar­ket audi­ences can help form a com­pre­hen­sive fun­nel strat­e­gy,” she said.

2. Automation + Human Intelligence

Automa­tion isn’t com­ing. It’s already here.

In fact, the trend we’re see­ing from the engines is more automa­tion, said Fred­er­ick Val­laeys, CEO, Optmyzr.

“Google said its search ads should be ‘ads that work for every­one’ and they mean it,” he said. “They believe automa­tion makes it pos­si­ble for more busi­ness­es to be suc­cess­ful search mar­keters so we’ll see more ‘smart’ fea­tures from Google, and Bing will fol­low in lock-step.”

Ben Wood, Dig­i­tal Direc­tor, Hal­lam, expects Google Ads to con­tin­ue to improve their built-in automa­tion features.

“It’s approach­ing the point where it’s best to lean into Google automa­tion tools rather than shun them in favor of third-par­ty tools,” he said. “It’s no secret that Google wants adver­tis­ers to use their auto­mat­ed bid­ding strate­gies in cam­paigns, by increas­ing the num­ber of data points used as part of their bid­ding strategies.”

But all this doesn’t mean you need to wor­ry about being replaced by a machine. Yet.

“It won’t be a race to see whether humans or machines are best,” Val­laeys added. “It will be a race to see which PPC experts have the best process to lever­age the machines to blow away their competition.”

As Ilya Cherepakhin, Exec­u­tive Media Direc­tor, Acronym, puts it:

“With Google’s respon­sive ads launch­ing, the lat­est change to exact match, and audi­ence tar­get­ing gain­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty, the days of man­u­al cam­paign man­age­ment are fad­ing away,” he said. “Espe­cial­ly, when work­ing on a large scale, machine learn­ing is prov­ing to be quite effective.”

That means you should free up time by let­ting the machines do the heavy lift­ing, Vir­ji said.

“If you spend a lot of time on repet­i­tive tasks such as bid track­ing, or report­ing, you can start to auto­mate it even fur­ther, so you can spend more time on where it real­ly counts: your cus­tomers,” she said.

Navah Hop­kins, Ser­vices Inno­va­tion Strate­gist, Word­Stream, agreed.

“Con­sid­er del­e­gat­ing grunt work (bid man­age­ment, key­word vari­ables, etc.) to automa­tion and machine learn­ing, while retain­ing tasks requir­ing cre­ativ­i­ty and brand/business knowl­edge (ad copy, cam­paign strat­e­gy, etc.).”

Eval­u­at­ing the machine’s rec­om­men­da­tions will be incred­i­bly impor­tant in 2019 and beyond.

“Some are good, some are bad,” said Brad Ged­des, Co-Founder, AdAl­y­sis. “Smart mar­keters need to under­stand when to lever­age and when to ignore the machine.”

3. Amazon & Advertising Alternatives

It’ll become more impor­tant than ever for mar­keters to diver­si­fy their PPC spend over the next year, accord­ing to Wes­ley MacLag­gan, SVP of Mar­ket­ing, Marin Software.

“We expect Ama­zon to con­tin­ue its hot streak in 2019, with Spon­sored Prod­uct Ads and oth­er for­mats being a key aspect to a suc­cess­ful PPC strat­e­gy, espe­cial­ly for CPG and retail brands,” he said.

Lisa Raehsler, Founder, Big Click Co., said that 2019 will be an amaz­ing time for ecom­merce brands because they will have more oppor­tu­ni­ties to reach buy­ers with greater per­son­al­iza­tion and precision:

Bing: Cur­rent­ly in pilot, Bing Ads is test­ing local inven­to­ry ads that dis­play prod­uct stock avail­abil­i­ty near­by to dri­ve in-store visits.
Face­book: Improved ads to include a new instant store­front tem­plate for­mat that can auto­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­ate a video with prod­ucts per­son­al­ized to users.
Pin­ter­est: New fea­tures allow users to buy direct­ly from a prod­uct pin with price and inven­to­ry avail­abil­i­ty. Not only that, they will also be able to make per­son­al­ized prod­uct rec­om­men­da­tions to users.
Google: Putting mobile first, Google’s local cat­a­log ads fea­ture local in-store avail­abil­i­ty and pric­ing in an easy scrol­lable mobile layout.

4. Account Management & The Role of PPC Marketers

AI is con­tin­u­ing to rev­o­lu­tion­ize PPC cam­paigns, accord­ing to Marc Poiri­er, CEO, Acquisio, but cam­paign man­agers are cer­tain­ly not out of a job.

“In fact, cam­paign man­agers are now able to con­duct their own machine learn­ing bat­tles to select which sys­tem will get their client’s or company’s cam­paigns the best results,” he said. “As peo­ple are more com­fort­able with these advance­ments and are adopt­ing them more fre­quent­ly, the machine bat­tles for best per­for­mance will esca­late this year.”

Daniel Gilbert, CEO, Brain­labs, believes that all PPC man­agers need to start think­ing about how to adapt their skill set in the age of machine learning.

“We’re not quite at the stage where AI can out­per­form humans, but we’re get­ting clos­er,” he said. “Know­ing how to lever­age automa­tion and devel­op­ing skills like new-mar­ket analy­sis, cross-chan­nel strat­e­gy, and com­plex com­peti­tor strate­gies is a must for any­one in this space.”

Val­laeys said PPC pro­fes­sion­als will have a lot of strate­giz­ing to do in 2019 to find their place in an ever-more auto­mat­ed industry.

“I believe that lay­er­ing sophis­ti­cat­ed man­age­ment on top of the engines’ automa­tions will pro­duce the best results so there will be plen­ty of oppor­tu­ni­ty for prac­ti­tion­ers to shine,” he said.

So what’s the future for PPC marketers?

“The PPCer of the future will uti­lize smart automa­tion for bid­ding, ad test­ing, and serv­ing, and query min­ing in order to make more effi­cient accounts and leave the PPCer to the weapon with which she can still sound­ly defeat any machine: all things client (or boss!) –fac­ing,” said Kirk Williams, Own­er, ZATO. “We see the future of paid search rest­ing in effi­cient accounts that allow the PPCers (who still want their jobs) to invest their time in trou­bleshoot­ing, analy­sis, report­ing, CRO assis­tance, pro­jec­tions, and… prob­a­bly meetings.”

As Susan Wenograd, Account Group Direc­tor, Aim­clear, points out, while man­ag­ing all those num­bers and all that math, nev­er for­get: you are a marketer!

“Keep sharp­en­ing that skill,” she said. “You will stay ahead of the game, because you won’t care what algo­rithms change or what fea­tures dis­ap­pear since you aren’t so behold­en to them.”

5. Attribution & Cross-Channel Advertising Experiences

More com­pa­nies are embrac­ing that we don’t live in a sin­gle chan­nel world and are adver­tis­ing (or mar­ket­ing in gen­er­al) across mul­ti­ple dif­fer­ent plat­forms more than ever, said Michelle Mor­gan, Direc­tor of Client Ser­vices, Clix Marketing.

That’s why Amy Bish­op, Own­er, Cul­ti­va­tive, expects an increased focus on cross-chan­nel and cross-device attribution.

“It has become eas­i­er and eas­i­er to build well-coor­di­nat­ed mul­ti-chan­nel cam­paigns, but report­ing silos con­tin­ue to be a chal­lenge for many busi­ness­es,” she said. “I expect to see an increased invest­ment in report­ing and attri­bu­tion martech and a high­er lev­el of pres­sure on all mar­keters to con­nect the dots across chan­nels and devices as it per­tains to results.”

The prob­lem?

There’s still no per­fect fix, Mor­gan said.

The solu­tion?

“Con­tin­u­ous­ly tweak and adjust mod­els based on per­for­mance,” Mor­gan said. “No sin­gle attri­bu­tion mod­el makes sense for all busi­ness­es, so it’s up to us all to find what works best for our unique snowflake of a busi­ness model.”

One solu­tion comes from Pete Kluge, Group Man­ag­er, Prod­uct Mar­ket­ing for Adobe Adver­tis­ing Cloud. He said savvy mar­keters should strive to deliv­er adver­tis­ing expe­ri­ences in 2019.

“Adver­tis­ers must under­stand that reach­ing con­sumers and keep­ing them engaged through each stage of the pur­chas­ing fun­nel requires the deliv­ery of pos­i­tive expe­ri­ences that keep them want­i­ng more – and search is very often part of that jour­ney,” he said. “Deliv­er­ing pos­i­tive adver­tis­ing expe­ri­ences, specif­i­cal­ly with search, will be the back­bone of any mar­ket­ing cam­paign as we move into the future.”

Added MacLag­gan:

“As the worlds of search, social and ecom­merce blend togeth­er, mar­keters will need a com­plete view of the entire cus­tomer jour­ney so they have a more accu­rate under­stand­ing of cam­paign per­for­mance and attri­bu­tion, and can allo­cate PPC bud­get accordingly.”

6. Ads

The ads them­selves – the mes­sages users see – will remain as crit­i­cal as ever.

“Should you use RSAs, Text Ads, the third head­line (it’s debat­able if you should skip the line or not); and real­ly look­ing at the cohe­sion of your ad mes­sage,” Ged­des said.

Pauline Jakober, Founder & CEO, Group Twen­ty Sev­en, added:

“In addi­tion, with mul­ti­ple ver­sions of head­lines and descrip­tions avail­able to us, I pre­dict that strate­gic mar­keters will need to become more delib­er­ate in con­sid­er­ing whether head­lines one, two, and three will work with descrip­tion lines one and two. (And don’t for­get about extensions!)”

7. Video

Hop­kins said you should plan to build social (specif­i­cal­ly video) into your strate­gies as social gains increas­ing place­ments on search engine result pages (SERPs).

“Even if you don’t want to put ad spend into video (aver­age cost per view is $0.02), you can still lever­age YouTube as an audi­ence tar­get for your search cam­paigns,” she said. “This is par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful if you’re in an expen­sive indus­try, and need help focus­ing your budget.

Gilbert added that video has emerged as the top type of mobile content.

“We’ll be see­ing plat­forms encour­ag­ing adver­tis­ers to adapt to more updates like Google’s recent ver­ti­cal video ads,” he said.

8. Remarketing

Lar­ry Kim, CEO, Mobile­Mon­key, said he is exclu­sive­ly focus­ing on remar­ket­ing in 2019. Why?

“Because they have much high­er CTRs and con­ver­sion rates.”

He has also been com­bin­ing remar­ket­ing with Facebook’s Click to Mes­sage ad format.

“Com­bin­ing these two tac­tics yields ROI that I haven’t seen since 2013 when ad prices were much low­er,” he added.

9. Brand Building

2019 will be about brand build­ing, accord­ing to Jeff Allen, Pres­i­dent, Hanapin Marketing.

“PPCers have been so focused on ROI that they for­get mar­ket­ing is also about cre­at­ing demand for a prod­uct and, hope­ful­ly, cre­at­ing brand loy­al­ty, too,” he said. “From dis­play, to YouTube, to keep­ing some low-per­form­ing gener­ic key­words run­ning… dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing in 2019 will stop try­ing to make every click prof­itable and start seg­ment­ing strate­gies by goals.”

“Plat­forms and tac­tics will come and go – a con­cen­trat­ed push to pri­or­i­tize brand affin­i­ty and loy­al­ty will stand a longer test of time,” Wenograd added.

10. More New Ad Types, Extensions & Features

With­out a doubt, 2019 will fea­ture sev­er­al known unknowns for PPC marketers.

That is, we know there will be sev­er­al new ad types, reports, and tools – but exact­ly what kind, we don’t yet know.

What do we know?

“Local Ser­vices Ads will roll out nation­wide and for addi­tion­al indus­tries. We can expect to see a shift in query vol­ume from the stan­dard key­word to text ad to land­ing page process, and start to think about local­iza­tion and con­ver­sion based oppor­tu­ni­ties,” Levy said.

“I expect that ads will start to per­me­ate oth­er facets of Google and Bing like maps, knowl­edge pan­els, answer box­es et. al. as Google starts to mon­e­tize ‘posi­tion zero’ and incen­tivize adver­tis­ers to keep their users right on the SERP.”

In the end, though, that’s what makes PPC mar­ket­ing so chal­leng­ing – and so rewarding.

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