Google Has Big Plans for Paid Search Marketing in 2017

If Google isn’t part of your paid search marketing strategy in 2017, you might just want to take a look at what Google has in store for businesses like yours.

paid search marketing

Search engine marketing has been synonymous with paid search marketing for a very long time. Pay per click marketing is a part of SEM that encompasses paid ads. Mostly mobile users get to experience PPC during their search, browsing and app using experience. Certain brands insert PPC ads within apps that serve as live links to their product sites. If you have been using mobile search options, you must have already experienced this.

2016 was the beginning of a new era for PPC and SEM

2016 was a big year for mobile advertising. It drove nearly $6 billion revenue in mobile search. According to IAB, mobile users surpassed desktop users for the first time last year. 2017 is going to be the year of mobile again. There is no way; marketing is going to be primarily desktop based anymore. Google AdWords and Bing Ads bring us news about machine learning based PPC innovations.

From basic product suggestions to ad management, machine learning is controlling every aspect of SEM. This will enable digital marketers to fine-tune their targeting system. Given Google’s recent smart display campaigns announcement, it is safe to assume that almost all oncoming ad campaigns will depend on machine learning.

It is time for more change: PPC 2017 onwards

As per Google’s declaration made in March 2017, they will not regard the order of words in search terms and add or ignore the function words in exact match cases of search terms and keywords. Digital marketers and content marketers in several Gold Coast Based SEO companies are hailing this change with high regard. This is a new update for Google AdWords. Typos, abbreviations, plural forms and adverbs will include variations in word form and order. Google introduced a similar update back in 2012. This captured plurals, spelling errors and typographical errors. Early tests show that advertisers will be able to see up to 3% correct match links. This will also maintain a comparable CTR and conversion rate.

A flurry of new features in Google Ads since the beginning of 2017

Back in January, Google introduced a pilot that selected 2000 accounts. They participated in the “Ads added by AdWords” campaign. This was a system that added advertisements into the testing rotation of ad groups. By the end of February 2017, the green label became ubiquitous to all ads on Google.

The Dynamic Search Ads got regular feeds in March 2017. Even text ads have a critical role to play. The headlines are compelling, and the marketers can see the extra characters in the ad description. Soon, Google started with the testing of a second description line. Price extensions were also a part of ad campaigns on all the devices. These extensions brought swipe-friendly, responsive carousels for mobile browsers.

AMPs for ads is something new that we have seen in the last three months. As per the Beta-version for PPCs, Google enables all advertisers to target their more search ads on AMP enabled landing pages only. This complements the mobile experience for all Google users. This is also accelerating the AMP project by Google.This prefers pages, which are fast, light and ideal for all mobile users. To make buying from PLAs a swift experience, in May, Google moved to open the Purchases on Google Beta.

With machine learning commanding most of the attention, audience targeting as a part of machine learning is a major theme this 2017. Similar audiences rolled out in Adwords for search and shopping in the first half of the year. This is a significant feature for finding in-market audiences who may be genuinely interested in your product. Bings Ads also excludes certain lists in retargeting campaigns of February. Bing has also started in-market testing and targeting custom audiences as a part of their paid search campaigns.

User interfaces have rarely been static with Google AdWords and paid search options. Finally, after months of begging, bargaining and brawling, Google is letting advertisers peek at their historical Quality Score data. This is bringing a welcome change in the bidding interface of the AdWords UI.

About a million users are in the process of getting unabated access to Google AdWord’s new UI. This is AdWords Next. By the end of 2017, this will be a part of every successful entrepreneurs and marketer’s marketing gameplan. All advertisers now have access to the Bing Ads Editor for Mac. This was back in March. Right now, advertisers are enjoying endless possibilities of ad optimisation and mobile-only campaign advantages from Bing.

How to cope with all the changes from the search engine giants?

Your company can only profit from the new features if you can prepare for oncoming changes. You are possibly already experiencing a few changes. Here are a few things you can do in advance –

  1. Review existing ideal match queries and see if your loss of function words changes the meaning of a search term. Check for all the variations and add the changes, which change the meaning, as negatives to your campaign.
  2. Review all the close variants in your Search Query report. Check for research results feel the effect of these variations.
  3. Take a note of your search query reports. Keep your eyes on all close variants of your targeted keywords.
  4. Update your scripts to match all search requirements.

Wrapping things up

Google has been talking context of content for quite a while now. The new changes in Google AdWords are strengthening the fact further. Now, you can target specific audience according to their search preferences by piggybacking on the search engine. However, be ready to shed out some pretty pennies if you want to target a high-ranking query. Google will weigh certain bids more heavily than the other as per their Ad Rank calculation.