Top 5 PPC Trends We are Looking Forward to for 2020

Google holds a monopoly on web search with 68.81% of the market share. And it has been the primary source of traffic for most of the businesses. But the company with a motto ‘Don’t Be Evil’ is surely being evil by eating up all your web traffic.

Even though your site might be ranking up there are chances your Google traffic graph would be saying a whole different story. Especially with the updates, they’ve come up in the past few months. It’s not a myth anymore.

Their Snippet feature has proven to be a boon for the searchers but it’s a nightmare for all the organizations who were most dependent on organic traffic for their business. And not all the time the information in the Snippet is correct.

So, is it even worth it for the searchers too?

Another nightmare is that brands now have to pay a hefty amount to rank on a keyword on which they might’ve worked for at least 9 months to 2 years to get to the 1st position.

And it’s not only for general keywords, but brands also have to pay to rank on their branded keywords.

Just imagine.

And if you don’t bet on your own keywords, then it becomes a treat for your competitors. Some brands just like to take revenge and some might pay hefty charges just to spread some bad word of mouth.

All of this has created a paid marketing black hole which is getting bigger and bigger day by day. Some might say that the current theories might be too small to handle this giant black hole.

The paid marketing and keywords’ power struggle is never-ending and to stay on top you need to know some tricks.

Since we’ve almost entered 2020, I thought I’d share some of the insights from our PPC trends and practices we are looking to follow in the coming year:

1. Artificial intelligence & Automation

Shocked to see this at the top?

Not really, right?

There are so many emerging start-ups and some of the giants are also putting their whole soul to disrupt this industry, but the main question here is how does AI cross roads with paid marketing?

If you spend most of your time around Google Ads, then you know that Google is sneaking in automation one thing at a time. We used to spend time adjusting bids, campaign names, countries, and whatnot, just to get our money’s worth. Now we have automated bidding which has taken a load off of us. But is it the right direction for PPC managers?

With automation, days of us spending too much of our energies into doing time-consuming tasks which results in almost nothing, are gone.

Some PPC managers and co-founders still think that it’s better that we are past the data-entry side of PPC and that we should look forward to growing businesses with the right automation tools.

On the other hand, we have an argument from Senior Account Director of Jumply like “What marketers will need to do is be the gatekeepers on whether these automated options are best for the clients or best for Google.”

So, it’s on you to decide whether to give full control to Google or retain your control by opting for third-party applications. One way or another we have to accept that automation is one of the major PPC trends and it’s knocking hard on our doors and it’s time we let it enter. Because if we don't we’ll just be another speck in the PPC black hole while our competitors eat a big share of the market.

2. Talking to the targeted audience

Proper audience targeting has been and always will be one of the biggest challenges for PPC managers. Blindly offering your products and services to a random audience never works. It has always been a priority for us too. 

And we’ll see more of that in 2020 in PPC. A PPC trend to look out for.

To be prepared for this, you have to better understand your audience, keywords, and their requirements. And then inculcate the right mixture of all the three at the right touchpoints in your customer’s journey. This will enable you to actually talk to your audience and help them grow by offering what’s right for them.

3. Focusing on other sources

As we mentioned above, it’s time to actually spread out your efforts throughout multiple traffic sources. 

This means that in the coming year you’ll have to pay attention to marketing budget allocation. Make sure to keep it fluid so that you can reallocate the resources based on performances.

Keep Quora, Reddit, Pinterest, Instagram/FB, Youtube, Amazon, and LinkedIn in mind while making your PPC strategies.

4. Bigger Marketing Picture

Continuing the above point, while targeting multiple platforms should be your top priority, you will also have to make sure to do cross-channel targeting with a proper cross-channel plan. You have to create a synergy around all your platforms in order to make yourself stand out of the crowd.

And you will have to look at the bottom-line results rather than concentrating on platforms separately. This will push you to evaluate PPC’s place in your marketing strategy and maybe make some changes. 

The bigger marketing picture might be a PPC trend for 2020 but its importance is way more than that. All the good marketing managers know that and religiously keep an eye over the big picture.

5. SEO + PPC for Better ROI

This combination is something we believe in.

For one of our clients, we aggressively do on and off SEO activities to keep their Google ranks intact and recently we’ve made PPC an integral part of their marketing strategy as well. It’s not one of the PPC trends but definitely a good practice to follow to keep up with all the above-mentioned PPC trends.

This strategy has given our clients an upper hand over their competitors and they are pretty much covering most of the top results on Google. Paid as well as organic.

So, we believe this is something that’s going to help you achieve your traffic and lead target for 2020.

Biztech IT Consulting Pvt Ltd is a Google Partner digital agency. We manage about $40,000 monthly spend budget. We generally follow the approach where we first invest our own time to understand your business, benchmark the expectations, and set up campaigns. Our services are thoroughly consultative in nature and we welcome your requests to review your current requirements.

PM for further discussion. Cheers :)