Three trends to keep in mind in your PPC campaigns

Many things have changed after a year full of unprecedented situations generated by the coronavirus. Companies are shifting to a remote work mode, people prefer to buy online instead of going to a physical store and conversations between people have turned into video calls.

A lot has changed this year, including from an advertising and marketing point of view in general. Advertisers have started to use more automation and artificial intelligence to create data-driven ads. In the same way, they have made the consumer's purchase journey a priority to get the most out of it. That is why I present these three trends that we will see from these changes.

1. Google's advertising data center (Ads Data Hub) will be a gold mine

In early 2020, Google announced that it would stop allowing third-party tracking pixels due to security concerns. This is how the lack of reliability in third-party pixels to obtain YouTube metrics, led Google to invest in Ads Data Hub.

This tool allows you to obtain personalized analysis by aligning data with specific objectives, while maintaining privacy and security. Likewise, it offers advertisers different types of analysis to measure the effectiveness of their ads across different types of devices.

This is how Ads Data Hub will become a gold mine for advertisers as it will provide them with specific statistics on the behavior of their consumers and how they interact with their ads.

2. Know your consumer's journey very well

An essential aspect of a PPC campaign is knowing how your consumers behave with your ads, at each stage of their buying journey. Understanding each of these stages of your audience will help you create better campaigns.

Here are 5 stages of the consumer buying journey and how to get the most out of your PPC campaigns for each stage.

• First stage: Brand recognition

Right now, consumers are learning about your business and your offer. People are looking for an answer to their questions. In other words, they are looking for someone to solve them, so at this moment their needs are not well defined.

How to take advantage of this stage?

Help them understand their needs and align your offer accordingly. Use ads with your brand identity to gain their attention. Use the keywords that they use when making their queries so that when they see your ads they generate curiosity in them and motivate them to investigate your proposal and your brand more.

• Second stage: Exploration

At this point, the consumer knows more about that answer that solves their problem. At this stage the potential buyer is sure of their need and probably knows different ways to solve their situation. Here they see you as part of the range of options and evaluate your value proposition, comments and testimonials from other buyers, etc.

How can you help?

At this stage, you can get closer to your audience and build long-term relationships. To do this, you can use Facebook lead-acquisition ads and thus address your customers' problems. This type of campaign will help you solve the doubts of your potential buyers.

• Third stage: Comparison

In this step, consumers evaluate different offers and find the ones that best suit their needs. At this point, your potential customers know the market prices, the comments of other buyers and the scores of the pages where your products appear. Here is a good opportunity to create an ad in which you can identify your audience with the use of cookies to reinforce the positioning of your brand.

• Fourth stage: Conversion

At this point your clients are already aware of their needs. Here they have already discarded the options that did not convince them and are ready to buy. At this time is where you should have a very strong call to action in your ads to motivate this audience to buy your product. A convincing call to action should lead your customers to make a purchase, so doing retargeting actions will help your customers always keep you in mind when making their purchase decision.

• Fifth stage: Loyalty

Finally your prospect has become a customer so all your effort at this point should be focused on retaining them. The best way to achieve this, in addition to a first-rate service, is by segmenting your audience into different retargeting groups with ads that attract their attention to your other products or services.

Understanding each stage of the consumer journey will help you create strong PPC campaigns. The more you know your customers, the better you can personalize your campaigns.

3. Automation will play a very important role.

According to Statista, the size of the automation market will grow between 71.5% and 83.2% during 2021.

According to this analysis, automation is expected to be a revolutionary trend this year. This is because thanks to Artificial Intelligence and machine learning technologies, advertisers will be able to automate tasks that allow them to find the right place for their ads. This topic will also be very important when testing different types of campaigns and will help you:

• Finding the best bid strategy
• Create bids that get the most conversions
• Improve cost per click by searching for ad auctions
• Monitor the performance of your ads and stop those that are not performing as expected.
• Prioritize ads that are generating results
• Generate ads dynamically, based on the behavior of your users and the content of your websites
• Generate ad performance reports dynamically.
• Get data from the ads and create copies to generate the maximum number of clicks.

As Artificial Intelligence learns more about the behavior of audiences and how they interact with your ads, you can create campaigns that improve your PPC performance.

Conclution

As an advertiser, I recommend that you incorporate these PPC trends into your marketing strategy to get the most out of your campaigns. During this year the automation generated by Artificial Intelligence will be in a leading role. Also, understanding the stages of your customers' journey will be very important to respond to the needs of your audience.

In addition to these trends we will see an increase in video ads for virtual reality and advertisers will probably turn their attention to other platforms such as Quora, LinkedIn, Reddit to reach more and more potential customers.

I hope that knowing these trends will help you better understand where the industry is going and where you should focus your efforts, based on improving your PPC campaigns.