What Changes to Expect from Google Ads in 2019

Changes to Expect from Google Ads Next Year

Changes to Expect from Google Ads: what’s going to happen to Google Ads in 2019?

What sort of changes will Google introduce, and what sort of things will you have to do to stay ahead of the curve?

via GIPHY

Well, good news!

We’ve looked into our Google Ads crystal ball, and we have a very good idea about what to expect from Google Ads in 2019.

The good news is that, for any forward-thinking business out there, Google Ads in 2019 will offer many exciting opportunities for growth.

How exciting!

Google Ads – Recent Updates You Can Implement Right Now

Google is constantly rejigging its products, and by our count, there have been four significant updates announced for Google Ads in December alone.

via GIPHY

61% of shoppers are interested in buying from new retailers during the festive period. It’s not too late to set up a special seasonal PPC campaign, and as Google has introduced a host of new features for their Display Ads, this is the perfect opportunity to road-test some of the strategies that could see you well throughout 2019.

Google Smart Display Campaigns offer a sophisticated solution for businesses seeking to enhance brand visibility and drive conversions across the web.

Audience Expansion Tool

The new features include a clever audience expansion tool designed to help you expand your reach and boost conversions with the same budget.

Dynamic Prospecting

Then there’s dynamic prospecting, which uses your product feed to show relevant products to shoppers based on their online behaviour across the Google network.

Custom Intent Audiences

Finally, custom intent audiences make reaching your perfect target audience quicker and easier than ever.

All you have to do is enter a few keywords or URLs and Google will suggest some segments to add to your campaign. How cool is that?

Changes to Expect from Google Ads – these new features could transform the way you use Google Ads in 2019. So why not try them out for size? Head here to read about them in more detail.

Google Ads 2019 – Other Things to Look Forward to

At their Marketing Live event in October, Google identified the three core concepts that’ll drive their online advertising in 2019 and beyond: Value, transparency, and trust.

Three nice, weighty, friendly concepts there. They look good on paper, but how will they work in practice?

Users Can Opt Out of Personalisation

We love remarketing, and we’re getting pretty excited about the new dynamic prospecting feature we mentioned above. They’re both means of ensuring that your ads get seen by people who might actually be interested in using your products or services.

Obviously, this can be great for conversions, and great for marketers. But less keen on this sort of feature are data-conscious shoppers who value their privacy. Some find the idea that ads might follow them across the internet to be a little unnerving.

via GIPHY

Now that Google is all about transparency and trust, they’re making it easier than ever for their users to opt out of ad personalisation. This means they won’t see ads based on their browsing history.

So that’s great news for data privacy! But it’s not such good news if your PPC strategy relies on remarketing and other advanced strategies. It’s not yet clear just how this update will affect these targeting methods such as location targeting, but we’ll be sure to blog about it once we have a better idea.

The Rise of Google Marketing

Google Marketing is a relatively new product that combines features from Analytics 360 and DoubleClick. It’s described as “a unified advertising and analytics platform for smarter marketing and better results.”

Google has introduced a range of tools specifically designed to help small businesses, along with some features more suited for larger enterprises. So there’s something for everyone!

Exciting features include Search Ads 360, which allows you to plan, buy and measure search ads, and Display Ads 360, which lets you manage bids and audiences from one centralised location. Meanwhile, a clear, uncluttered, and beautifully colourful interface makes it possible for your entire marketing team to plan effective end-to-end campaigns without having to resort to long chains of emails.

Google Marketing could transform the PPC landscape. Once again, we’ll be sure to bring you the very best advice on how to make the most of this exciting new product once we’ve had a chance to properly experiment.

More Powerful Video Ads

Videos are where it’s at. 91% of smartphone users have either bought or planned to buy something after seeing a video ad. Google owns YouTube, and a host of new features will make video advertising easier and more powerful than ever before.

There’s TrueView for reach, which lets you use CPM bidding to considerably expand your reach among your targets. Then there’s TrueView for action, which you might think of as a video version of remarketing. Essentially, you can advertise your products on YouTube to people who have already searched for you on Google.

via GIPHY

Finally, there’s a very clever little feature called Maximise Lift. This is a Smart Bidding strategy that lets you reach the sort of people who might search for your products after watching a video. How? By automatically adjusting bids at auction time to “maximise the impact your video ads have on brand perception throughout the customer journey.”

With these three features, 2019 could be the year you make a fortune through video ads. How exciting!

Bigger and More Responsive PPC Ads

Welcome to the thrilling new world of Responsive Search Ads. With 15 headlines and four descriptions to play with, Responsive Search Ads will let you hit the right prospects with the right ads like never before.

How does it work? Well! At the moment, your search ad strategy involves writing components specifically to work together. This headline with this description and this link, and so on. But with Responsive Search Ads, you’ll write a pool of copy, and Google Ads will automatically test different permutations of headlines and descriptions until it finds a combination that works.

With Responsive Search Ads, Google will automatically show the most effective ad to different searchers based on the keyword they’ve searched for, the device they’re using, and their past browsing behaviour.

Is it just us, or does that sound like the best thing in the world?!!

Soon Responsive Search Ads will be rolled out to all Google Ads users. Watch this space for a guide to making the most of them.

New PPC Opportunities for Small Businesses

Google has thought of everything. In 2019, it will be possible for all businesses to make the most of Google Ads, even if they don’t have a website.

via GIPHY

Let us introduce you to Smart Campaigns, a new set of features specifically designed for small businesses. If you’ve no prior experience with PPC, you can just click a few buttons and Google will set up a campaign to help you achieve your goals in a matter of minutes.

And yes, you don’t even need a website. You can set whatever goal you want, and this can be something like “more phone calls” or “more physical visits to my store.” What’s more, Google is experimenting with auto-optimised landing pages. These will use machine learning to pull information about your business from your ad in order to create a landing page from scratch, complete with in-built conversion tracking.

While these features will no doubt help many businesses, and while they’re simply stunning feats of programming, Smart Campaigns reminds of us AdWords Express. That is, it’ll be great for those who don’t have much time or expertise, but it’ll be no substitute for the sort of powerful targeting, accurate reporting and phenomenal results that are possible with a full Google Ads campaign.

More Changes on the Horizon?

As we said at the start of this post, Google constantly rejigs its products. Features come and features go, so you need to be prepared to roll with it.

via GIPHY

It pays to be aware of emerging trends so that your PPC campaigns are always fit for purpose.

For example, increasing numbers of people are using voice search, and some PPC experts believe you should already be priming your Google Ads campaigns to suit this audience.

Some think that this time next year the PPC landscape will be all but unrecognisable. PPC experts from Microsoft even seem to think that the days of keywords might be numbered.

Christi Olson is one of Microsoft’s resident search experts. She advises that PPC marketers need to stop focusing on keywords and start focusing on audiences. “The key to success in 2019 and beyond,” she said, “will be to create a detailed strategy of the various audience types and audience lids and how you can layer them (with positive and negative bid types) to shape your paid search strategy.”

Voice search and the end of keywords? Whatever happens in 2019, one thing’s for sure. If you want to make the most of PPC, you’re going to need an expert on your side.

We’re the PPC Geeks. PPC is what we do. Subscribe to our blog to get the very latest updates on what to expect from Google Ads in 2019.

And if you want to get the most from your digital advertising campaigns in 2019, get in touch to arrange your free Google Ads audit.