Paid Search Trends to Watch in 2018
In the ever-changing digital landscape, keeping up with where the PPC industry is headed can be a challenge, but it is necessary to ensure that your campaigns aren’t left in the dust. If you haven’t updated your best practices and long-term strategies to account for the major trends coming this year, then you are missing out on big opportunities.
Machine learning and automation will continue their rise in 2018
Like it or not, paid search management is becoming more and more automated. Google has already pushed more automation into PPC buyers’ day-to-day lives by shifting ad rotation, ad creation, bid optimization, ad extension optimization, and more into more automated processes. This trend will continue in 2018 with even more accuracy in these machine learning-based tasks.
Smart Bidding goes mainstream
Google’s Smart Bidding tools are the next frontier in PPC bidding strategies: rather than optimizing performance based solely on keywords, Smart Bidding takes hundreds of audience signals into consideration that provide a more robust picture of who is searching for that term and what their level of intent looks like.
Based on this, Smart Bidding will lead to front-end success, but will require more sophisticated downstream optimization to improve ROI. “Best practices” of years past will need to adjust to fit into the new rules of machine learning. Bidding by location, device, audience, and more will become more automated, but structure and settings must be in place and maintained to support this automation effectively.
More sophistication in audience targeting will be critical to cost efficiencies
Audience targeting will continue to become more advanced in 2018, and this feature will play a bigger part in search and lead to more efficient spending. Advertisers will be able to apply more sophisticated bid strategies based on audience data to be more effective in a competitive space. Users will come to expect personalized experiences every time they interact with a brand, so landing page tests in 2018 should focus on providing this personalization.
Advertisers can’t keep ignoring attribution
For many EDU advertisers, moving beyond last-click attribution will have less short-term impact than originally billed but will unlock long-term optimization opportunities. Optimizing solely to last click will squeeze your funnel over time, cutting out prospective students who first experience your brand through generic or high-level program searches. Truly understanding your brand’s unique attribution model and adjusting your marketing to support this will help optimize your spending across upper and lower funnel areas.
AMP pages and mobile site speed will continue to dominate the conversation.
Google continues to push Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), but EDU advertisers have been slow to adopt as the pared-down pages present challenges with tracking and development. We expect to see Google increase the support and resources they offer to top advertisers to increase adoption rates; look for more usage of this format in 2018.
Of course, AMP pages are not the only path to fast load times and strong mobile performance. At Thruline, we have been focusing heavily on optimizing mobile site speed (mSpeed) and improving load times; these improvements to mSpeed have had a direct impact on mobile performance, and an indirect impact on Quality Score, Ad Rank, and CPC. This has helped support our mobile success across Thruline partners.
The paid search landscape continues to evolve into an increasingly complex space. Advertisers who are standing still run the risk of becoming stagnant; embracing the emerging trends is key to staying one step ahead of the game.
Sarah Russell, Director Digital Media
