What Matters and What’s Next in Paid Search

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2024 saw many changes that are going to impact the way paid search is done going forward. 

For example:

• Google changed the functioning of search ads with assets.
• Google rolled out various AI tools to enhance the quality and improve how advertisers optimize Performance Max campaigns.
• Google replaced commission-based bid strategies for hotel ads with target ROAS.
• Google updated GA4 to show advertisers how many users are eligible for ad personalization and remarketing, among other updates.

And more changes are likely to occur in the next few months, after Google gives users the option to opt out of being tracked by third-party cookies for advertising purposes. 

Unfortunately, many marketers aren’t poised to adapt to a world where the pool of third-party data is smaller than before. Even at present, most ads only average a conversion rate of 2.35% as opposed to the recommended 10%. This is likely to get worse if SEM teams don’t learn how to personalize ads in a world with a combination of third-party and first-party data. 

You can prepare for changes like this one and more by staying updated on the latest top trends in paid search. In this guide, we break down what to expect from paid search next and how to adapt to changes that are coming as well. 

What Will Matter in Paid Search in the Future?

You’ll have to contend with more changes in paid search, from increasing automation to AI overviews, targeting changes, and more. Adapting requires you to optimize your PPC campaigns by embracing AI tools and integrating SEO and PPC, among other solutions.

Here’s a comprehensive look at what you need to prioritize:

1. Automation in Paid Ad Campaigns

Paid search automation tools are becoming more popular because the need to effectively process more data than humanly possible is increasing. 

PPC automation tools offer quick adjustments to your ad placements, keyword selections, and spending. Using automation tools to optimize and manage your PPC campaigns is key now as it offers many advantages, including:

• Direct your budget to the top-performing ads and improving your return on investment.
• Enable time-saving ad schedule adjustments, keyword performance evaluations, and pauses. Tools like Performance Max also let you buy ads across various platforms in one campaign.
• Enhance your targeting precision using predictive analytics and real-time data.
• Lower chances of errors that waste your ad budget like overbidding and mistargeting.
• Enhance scalability as it becomes less challenging to manage more ads.

Pro tip: It’s crucial to provide automation tools with quality data to ensure well-performing and accurate outputs.

When starting with PPC automation, choose conversion goals that offer you the best value. Also, select tools with features that can provide an adequate report on your campaign. 

2. Smart Bidding Strategies

Smart bidding matters for making PPC campaign optimizations easy and adjusting bids using real-time data to maximize your budget.

This automatic bidding component optimizes conversions using Google AI. Smart bidding strategies rely on search query performance, target budgets, predicted conversion rates, and contextual signals like device type and time.

These strategies include:

• Target CPA (Cost per Action): This is excellent for both Display and Search ads. It boosts conversions while maintaining the average cost per action that you set. Target CPA assesses your historical data to avoid unprofitable clicks.
• Target ROAS (Return on Ad Spend): This strategy works by predicting potential conversions and their value using the data you provide. It then prioritizes returns by setting a maximum cost per conversion (CPC).
• Maximize Conversions: This strategy is excellent for maximizing conversions, but it may drain your budget the fastest. The aim is to get the most conversions within your set budget limits.
• Maximize Conversion Value: For this strategy, Google AI uses your revenue-related metrics to offer valuable conversions aligned with your revenue goals.

Choosing the best smart bidding strategy depends on your goals.

The image below shows what Google recommends.

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Keep in mind that these are just recommendations. You’ll need to consult a Google ads specialist to finalize these bidding strategies. 

3. Evolution of Keyword Match Types

Google is loosening keyword match types, which may boost your ads’ visibility and CTR.

Currently, there are four Google Ad match types:

• Exact match: Ads appear in searches with the same meaning or intent.
• Phrase match: Ads show for queries that include your keyword’s meaning.
• Broad match: Ads show for related keyword searches.

With loosened keywords, Google allows ads to appear for broader terms that are relevant to exact and phrase-match keywords. Hence, you can appear for more searches with exact and phrase keywords than before without impacting match accuracy.

It’s also important to incorporate negative keyword match types, including negative exact, negative phrase, and negative broad match. This category is for keywords you don’t want ads to show when users search.  

Negative exact match keywords restrict less traffic than those in your negative phrase match. Likewise, the latter restricts less traffic than keywords in your negative broad match.

For example, your ad could appear for the following searches if you include “running shoes” in your negative broad match terms:

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However, having the same term in your negative exact match increases your likelihood of appearance in four of these searches:

Same image source as above.

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4. Adapt to AI Changes in Search and Advertising

Search Generative Experience (now AI overviews) took Google by storm upon its release. Search Engine Land reported that 84% of searches had AI overviews as of December 2023.

The biggest concern for paid search marketers is that AI overviews remove the need to click on a website for adequate information. Reduced site traffic impacts your returns; hence, adjusting is necessary.

The latest statistics indicate that only 15% of searches still have these overviews. Sectors like healthcare have AI overviews for 63% of their queries.

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Despite the drop, AI overviews will be around for a long time as new updates and tests continue.

Some of the ways to keep up with AI overviews include:

• Use broad match, as Google prioritizes this match type due to scalability.
• Use value-based bidding to get quality users.
• Use in-platform measurements, data-driven attribution, and cross-channel measurements simultaneously. This triangulated approach allows for better performance understanding and subsequent campaign optimization.
• Use Demand Gen and Performance Max to automate the process and improve customer sourcing

In a January 2024 report, Google said, “We’re actively improving this generative AI experience in Search and committed to gains in quality and capabilities.”

5. Use Automatically Created Assets (ACAs)

ACAs are an optional AI feature Google rolled out in 2022 to improve responsive ads. Previously, these AI assets were only available to open beta users in English. But in 2023, the company made ACAs available to everyone and expanded them to seven other languages.

ACAs use your ad’s context to boost search ad relevance by generating custom descriptions and headlines.

These campaign-level assets have various advantages, including:

• Performance improvement: ACAs help you deal with creative fatigue. Numerous headline and description variations may enhance your ads’ performance. In fact, Search Engine Journal notes that ACAs boosted conversion by 2% at the same cost per conversion.
• Increased relevance: ACAs can sometimes use generative AI to curate headlines and descriptions that resonate best with user searches.
• Enhanced productivity: Automatic creation is faster and may nail your ads better using generative AI. Quick and satisfactory delivery allows you to focus on other tasks.

6. Leverage First-Party Data

Google has once again decided to backtrack third-party cookie deprecation.

Even though the third-party cookie deprecation isn’t happening now, first-party data will now play an even bigger role because this only means the pool will become smaller. 

If you embrace first-party data from now itself, you’ll be able to compete favorably.. Notably, a study also found that using adequate first-party data can double your ad returns and improve cost efficiency by 1.5 times — so it can be actually a good thing. 

First-party data will allow you to better understand your audience using your own data, which may enhance your ads’ efficiency. You can use it to personalize your ad copy to meet searcher needs to improve your CTR and conversions.

Here are some other ways to use first-party data in PPC: 

• Integrate first-party data with Google Analytics using your customer relationship management. The integration enables you to access metrics like lead-to-sale conversion rates, lead-scoring data, and the sale value of your leads.
• Use it to optimize your remarketing lists. Optimized lists maximize your reach to quality customers, boost conversions, and ensure the effectiveness of your ad budget.
• Use it to personalize ads and landing pages. Directly speaking to consumers is crucial, as 71% expect personalization, and 76% find its absence frustrating. Tweaking your ad content and landing pages to meet user needs gives you an advantage over competitors.

7. Integrate PPC with SEO

Using PPC and SEO together provides a broader reach since you stand to receive both paid and organic traffic. It also allows you to use your time efficiently and may lower your spending.

This is because these marketing strategies are more interconnected than you’d think. It makes sense to tackle them together rather than in isolation.

For instance, optimizing landing pages is an important part of SEO/CRO. The same optimization can also help your landing pages become a better fit for keywords you are targeting via PPC. Better landing pages are also known to improve Quality Scores lowering your cost per click.

Additionally, Both SEO and PPC focus on similar metrics, like CTR and conversion rates. Integrating analytics from both sources can give you a broader understanding of your consumers and improve marketing efficiency.

Also, PPC can be a great way to figure out if an organic keyword is worth going after for conversions. 

For instance, if a keyword like “kitchen remodeling”, which has both commercial and informational intent, keeps returning less than usual conversions in PPC — you can identify if you should spend SEO resources going after it before you sink a lot of effort into it. 

8. Cost per Lead (CPL) Management

Data from recent years indicates a rising cost per lead, making it ever important to focus on your CPL. 

The average Google Ads CPL in 2024 is $66.69. That’s a 24.6% increase from 2023’s $53.52 and a 63.7% increase from 2022’s $40.74.

But what’s a good CPL? 

Good CPL rates vary with your industry. Some, like legal services and employment, have averages exceeding $80. Meanwhile, others, like animals and pets, average under $20.

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Here are some ways to lower your CPL and stay below your industry’s average:

• Use behavioral retargeting, predictive analytics, and data segmentation to attract the right visitors.
• Have visually appealing, personalized ads with compelling CTAs.
• Improve your Quality Score to at least seven.
• Lower or exclude bids for low-converting periods, networks, devices, and locations.
• Cautiously lower your targets for automatic bids.
• Spend more on keywords with high conversions and low CPC.
• Use negative keywords for phrases with high clicks but low conversions or high impressions but few clicks.
• Optimize your landing pages.
• Set up value-based conversion tracking both online and offline and remove tracking hangups.
• Use single-themed ad groups for better relevance.
• Try Google Ads A/B testing.

9. Evaluate Your Existing Responsive Search Ads (RSAs)

Google rolled out three RSA updates in February 2024, including:

• Headlines: Google displays one headline if it’s likely to improve your ad’s performance. Additionally, headlines occasionally appear at the start of description lines.
• Account-level automated assets: Google’s AI-generated assets replace manual assets if the algorithm predicts automated assets will boost ad performance.
• Campaign level changes: You can associate up to two descriptions and three headlines at the campaign level and pin them at select positions.

While these changes can boost your performance, they minimize your control.

Notably, single-headline ads appear more frequently. As a result, the mentioned campaign-level changes are redundant and you have even lesser control on ad appearance.

This is why, it’s a must to ensure your ads are sound — irrespective of the number of headlines and descriptions that appear and their order.

For instance, all related sentences should appear in one description, not two. Otherwise, if only one portion appears, it won’t make sense to searchers. Likewise, if you don’t pin sentences, your description may appear in any order and be incoherent.

Keep in mind that pinning makes your ads less responsive and flexible. It causes the system to be less effective at asset combinations. So, only pin when necessary, for instance, if:

• You must include a legal disclaimer.
• You want your brand’s name on all ads.
• Your previous data indicates that an asset performs excellently on the account.

10. Optimize for Voice Search Advertising

Voice assistants like Google Home and Alexa are becoming increasingly popular. Your paid search ads must adapt to appear in these searches as they use different phrasing than normal searches.

Consider these stats:

• +50% of adults use voice search daily.
• There are over one billion voice searches monthly.
• 58% of users used voice search to access local businesses.

These statistics mean that if you optimize your ads for voice search:

• You increase your likelihood of appearing to users who make purchasing decisions in their households.
• You tap into a vast pool of customers you’d otherwise miss.
• You can reach customers within your area, which may improve the likelihood of conversions.

Here are some ways to optimize your ads for voice search and get such benefits:

• Use long-tail keywords.
• Use questions and conversational phrases.
• Use local keywords.
• Bid on phrases with “where” and “when.” Such searchers are at the final stages of the purchase funnel and, hence, likely to convert.
• Include ad extensions such as your contact.
• Optimize your landing pages for mobile.

Keep Up With Paid Search Updates to Maximize ROI

AI and machine learning are reshaping PPC marketing, and you should adapt to stay competitive and meet your ROI targets.

You can only succeed by staying updated with changes, monitoring your engagement metrics, and being willing to try new tactics.

Take time to analyze your audience and create relevant, personalized ads and CTAs. If something’s not working, try another variation and assess your A/B testing results to pick the best solutions.

At Vizion Interactive, we have the expertise, experience, and enthusiasm to get results and keep clients happy! Learn more about how our status as a Google Partner, along with our PPC Management, Google Shopping Ads, Social Media Advertising, Amazon Advertising, and other Paid Media services can increase sales and boost your ROI. But don’t just take our word for it, check out what our clients have to say, along with our case studies.