Ep 26: 4 PPC Predictions For 2021

It’s a brand new year so that means we’ve got a whole host of changes to the paid ads landscape to look forward to. Today I’m going to give you my predictions for what’s going to happen to the PPC industry in 2021.

This is Marketing In 10 with your host, Jim Lastinger. Real-world marketing strategies and tactics all in 10 minutes or less.

Hey everybody, Jim Lastinger hope your 2021 is off to a good start. Hopefully we can leave the train wreck that was 2020 well behind us. Okay. So as always, the pace of change in the PPC industry is always increasing and I feel that 2021 is not going to be any different. So on this episode, I’m going to give you four predictions for what I think is going to happen to the paid search world this year.

Prediction number one, I believe that automation is going to continue to be even more of the default in Google Ads. So Google Ads has been trending toward automation for several years now and I expect that to continue. So what does that mean? Well, first I think that we’re going to see a lot more smart campaigns. We already have smart shopping campaigns that work really well. And I expect that to at least begin to start moving into search campaigns. So we already have some dynamic search campaigns that are kind of like smart search campaigns, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see those rebranded as smart search or something like that. And eventually they probably will become the primary type of search campaign, kind of like the default type of search campaign.

Also, I expect more responsive types of ads with much more ad copy being automatically generated for you. Currently, most of the ad copies that Google Ads kind of automatically generates is really, really bad. And I would expect them to be putting some sort of effort into improving that because that’s going to kind of be essential for automating search campaigns going forward. So I think that that’s kind of a key part of having a hands-off smart search campaign strategy as better ad copy so I expect that to improve dramatically in the near future, if not in this year.

Prediction number two, I expect to see shopping campaigns become more automated than the already are. So smart shopping campaigns typically dominate the old style shopping campaigns and I expect that to continue to accelerate this year. I don’t know that the traditional shopping campaigns will ever go away fully, but it might get harder to create those in the near future as they kind of continue to lose favor with advertisers.

Prediction number three, as you know there’s a lot of new privacy initiatives out in the online space right now, so I believe that these new privacy approaches will start hampering retargeting and remarketing campaigns. This might end up affecting Facebook ads more than Google Ads, but it’s definitely going to be a big part of the discussion this year. Privacy is becoming more important than ever as it should be and we’ve already seen Apple’s new approach to privacy and how that’s going to limit the amount of data available to Facebook. And I expect other companies to begin to follow Apple’s lead in the near future and start taking privacy more seriously. And ultimately that’s going to hurt any ad campaigns that rely on user data heavily. And things such as retargeting campaigns and certain types of Facebook campaigns that rely almost exclusively on demographic or interest data.

And finally prediction number four, I think that Microsoft advertising is going to continue to get better. Microsoft ads are kind of an under the radar network. It gets decent amounts of traffic and performance pretty well, it’s just not as many people use it, not as many advertisers are there. And I think that people will become more privacy focused you’ll see other search engines like Bing gather a bit more of market share than what they’ve had historically. It’s easy to import your existing Google Ad campaigns into Microsoft Advertising. So it was really easy to use and to start and to at least start to switch over, you’ll never completely leave Google Ads, of course, but you can at least easily start venturing into the Microsoft Advertising space. So I think everybody should at least test that out. And I’ve talked about Microsoft ads in detail back in episode 11, so go back and take a listen to that for a little bit more background information and I’ll put a link to that in the show notes.

Those are my predictions for 2021. I don’t know how many of those will be right, but I’m sure at least part of it will come to fruition or kind of at least start to head in that direction. That’s all for this week’s episode, I’ll be back soon with another episode of Marketing in 10, until then take care everybody, have a great day.