The trends and obstacles are already taking shape for all PPC marketers in 2024. Changes in the privacy and data landscape are driving most of them, along with continued economic struggles.
But what are these challenges and how can we prepare and react to them? Here are the five biggest he predicts for the rest of the year.
1. Segmentation by audience
With the end of third-party cookies and stricter consent rules, the website’s data coverage will decrease, limiting your enjoyment. This means that remarketing audiences will gradually decrease and these campaigns will have less impact.
Own data will be even more important than ever. The alternative is that we rely more on customers and companies to participate and create their data. Many don’t understand the importance, and it’s our job to help them understand that.
Own numbers will be significantly lower than GA4 Audiences, Google Ads Remarketing Audiences, and Custom Target Audiences, meaning there will be a shift to direct use of this data as real target audiences at the campaign and more than one component to enhance your Smart Bidding and automated account features.
The quantity of audience data will suffer, but with the right approach and data capture strategies, the quality should prevail.
2. Optimization of the account
Optimizing your daily campaign has evolved dramatically over the past few years. Improved Smart Bidding has changed your manual bidding habits, and negative keywords are still important, but not as time-consuming as before. Performance Max has brought a different approach to analyzing and optimizing campaigns.
And with the new Demand Gen campaign type giving Performance Max a hit in Google’s favorite kids category of late, the growth of campaign types with limited information and targeting information is growing.
For maximum performance, in particular, we spend less time on Google Ads accounts trying to improve performance.
Yes, the main goal of Google’s multi-channel automated campaign type is to spend less time on tactical improvements and more time on larger strategic opportunities.
However, feed-based campaigns focus more on the Google Merchant Center (GMC). This was an area that most PPC marketers only needed to know the basics. Now, it is becoming an increasingly important battleground to improve your campaigns through feed optimization.
Google knows this, which is why you’ve seen it evolve over the past few years with additional growth reporting features, such as the Price Competitiveness Report, Top Sellers Reports, and the Scoreboard shopping experience Valuable resources for this broader strategy of support that Google wants us to embrace.
But the change comes with the likely full migration to Google Merchant Center Next, which is supposed to be an easier way for retailers to manage their feeds. For advertisers, it’s another learning experience they’ll have to adjust to.
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3. Content
Like everything else on this list, attention to content has evolved dramatically over the last few years in research. We’ve moved from standard text ads to expanded text ads to the current ad type of responsive search ads.
While the number of titles and descriptions has been expanded, the amount of custom variations has been diluted. Campaigns don’t (or shouldn’t) have endless ad groups tailored to individual keywords.
Within performance, we’re still skeptical of how Google uses our creativity, so we often go against best practices to regain some control with feed-only resource pools.
Allowing Google to prioritize the order of titles and descriptions may be unsettling, but it’s becoming a reality. Yes, we can set our titles and descriptions, but with the current new AI features being rolled out, it takes even more control away from us if we want to try.
It could also take away the authenticity and originality of ads, please accept the evolution and hand over the keys to Google. For an account manager or marketing department, it’s hard to give up control.
All advertising platforms are shifting towards AI content creation, so the ability to stand out is becoming more of a challenge and an opportunity.
AI will play a key role in PPC for the foreseeable future (and again, that’s a whole article in itself), but those who use it for day-to-day tasks save time and target content instead of creation they will rise above the noise and prosper.
Dig Deeper: How generative AI is revolutionizing PPC
4. Follow-up
This used to be a much simpler practice than most of us burying our heads in the sand and relying on web developers to carry the load. We still rely on that technical support, especially with some of the more advanced conversion features.
However, with accounts more reliant than ever on accurate conversion data and an ever-growing list of tracking features, advertisers need to be more informed and proactive.
2023 was a big year with GA4 migration and increased reliance on improved conversions. This can now be said for V2 consent mode, along with offline conversion tracking and profit tracking (one of my favorites).
Although there is a lot of information and courses on conversion tracking, many advertisers are still not comfortable in this space and many agencies do not offer the implementation of tracking as a direct service, even with the help of the ‘Google implementation.
But with the abandonment of cookies, these features are now necessary and not nice. Those who improve skills and provide technical support and guidance will be in the minority, and when e-commerce struggles, many cannot help but ignore the needs of their customers.
Even with this support, many clients and companies have shifted their internal goals over the last year or so away from revenue generation or a ROAS model more towards profit generation, which is fair since the cost of delivery, manufacturing, etc., has been consumed. on the margins Again, advertisers tend to bury their heads in the sand on this one. Tell us a ROAS goal or revenue goal and we’ll work to achieve it. Profit is your problem.
This is where an opportunity lies, with over 90% of eCommerce accounts optimizing towards either revenue or ROAS, when neither is the primary goal for many of these businesses.
Some third-party tools (such as profit metrics) allow you to create conversion tags that only report profit per transaction. You can then optimize the return on ad spend at the campaign level. This is a potential game changer for many accounts and I can only see the use of this type of tracking software growing.
5. Reports
I’ve already talked about how we continue to struggle with the Performance black box. Google has improved some of its insight reporting in the past year, while Mike Rhodes’ excellent Performance Max script continues to evolve and help us all. Still, with the introduction of AI features, the fear is that Google will continue to sweep some reports under the rug so that there is no backlash.
Even with account-level conversions, how accurate will this data be with increased consent mode coverage and reshaping? And what will be the impact on GA4 with less audience coverage here with users turning off cookie tracking?
In the last eight months I have had to rely more than ever on platform reporting because some of the GA4 underreporting is too low. The Shopify and Magento reporting stack is not as strong as GA4 in general, so workarounds must be put in place to pick the most relevant data from each. This can be difficult for some customers who are only used to certain reports in Universal Analytics but have had to adjust their internal reports.
While there is still a struggle with many advertisers to adapt to GA4, there are some new reporting features that add value. We may not be able to make a similar change, but continuing to learn GA4 custom reports and covering legacy UA reports with alternative GA4 features is the best way to adapt.
As Google intended, with advanced reporting in Google Merchant Center, we regain what we lose from a tactical perspective in Google Ads platform reporting with new strategy-focused reporting in GMC.
So there are less conversations about what search terms have come through a specific campaign, but instead where our product prices are positioned relative to the market or what product catalog opportunities are there to take advantage of based on top-selling shopping reports. Conversations that most retailers would rather have as they are the biggest questions that help them scale.
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Clients will look to their agency and freelancers to guide them through this advertising period and economic uncertainty. With chaos comes opportunity, and those who embrace change and adapt will come out on top and take the initiative.
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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