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10 PPC Trends You Won’t Want to Ignore in 2022

10 PPC Trends You Won’t Want to Ignore in 2022

As a small business owner, you know that pay-per-click or PPC ad campaigns are essential to your digital marketing campaigns. PPC ads as a marketing strategy help you reach audiences more cost-effectively and provide near-instant traffic.

The world of PPC advertising is constantly evolving. In November 2021, Google announced bold and sweeping changes to their AdWords PPC management platform that fundamentally altered the online ad landscape. Smart WSI Marketing is an internet marketing company that helps businesses reach their audiences across all devices with on-trend PPC ads. If you’re not already taking advantage of all the benefits these new PPC trends offer, our agency will show you how making the investment can significantly boost your business results. Call us today to schedule a consultation.

Up Your Online Marketing Game: PPC Trends for 2022

PPC is an internet marketing strategy that works with search engines and other channels like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube to generate leads, increase sales, and promote brand awareness. With new PPC strategies emerging all the time, it can be challenging to decide which ones are worth paying attention to.

No worries, we have you covered! Read on for 10 trending PPC internet marketing strategies you should use in 2022 and beyond.

Trend #1: PPC Automation

If there’s one trend everyone’s talking about, it’s automation. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are being used to automate labour-intensive tasks associated with Google and Bing ads. They’re playing a greater role in optimizing PPC campaigns, as marketers use them to:

  • Calculate the best bidding strategies.
  • Set bids to garner as many conversions as possible.
  • Improve cost-per-click (CPC).
  • Eliminate low-performing ads and prioritize those generating top results.
  • Identify performance issues.
  • Dynamically generate ads based on user behavior and website content.
  • Create and optimize ad copy based on data feeds.
  • Automatically generate ad performance reports.

Trend #2: AI-Driven Ad Campaigns

Experts predict AI’s economic impact will reach nearly $16 trillion by 2030. AI is helping marketers create better-performing ad campaigns and is particularly useful to:

  • Analyze which bids are likely to get maximum traffic.
  • Calculate ad impact on quality scores.
  • Identify conversion likelihood from a given customer.
  • Optimize keywords, ads, and campaigns when a particular event happens, such as the CPC falling below a specified amount.
  • Predict the click-through rate (CTR) of future ads.

Best of all, as AI learns more about your audience’s behaviors, it more accurately creates targeted ads to improve your PPC campaigns’ performance.

Trend #3: Video Ads

All you need to do is look at the numbers to understand how critical video ads can be to your digital marketing efforts.

  • By the end of 2022, over 80% of all consumer and business internet traffic will be attributed to videos.
  • When compared to text, people remember up to 95% of a message from a video.
  • More than 90% of mobile users report sharing videos with family and friends.
  • Nearly six in 10 people say they trust a brand with videos more than one without them.

You can leverage videos in your campaigns to introduce your brand in a unique way, market your story, and show how your products and services work.

Trend #4: Ads Data Hub

Many marketers have used third-party pixel tracking to monitor ad impressions. However, Google no longer allows the practice on sites like YouTube due to security concerns and instead uses Ads Data Hub (ADH). The tool enables marketers to access impression data across all their media campaigns and provides them with more comprehensive reporting and measurement to understand the effectiveness of their ads.

While there are some limitations to the Ads Data Hub, it does provide more in-depth insights into evolving consumer behavior and your audience’s responses to ads.

Trend #5: Smart Bidding

A subset of automated bidding strategies, Smart Bidding uses machine learning to optimize your ads for conversion-based, pre-set goals. It takes the guesswork out of bidding for Google Ads and automatically optimizes for conversions in each auction.

To use Smart Bidding, you simply tell Google what your advertising goal is, and the tool figures out how to achieve it within your budget. The process works for several PPC goals, including cost-per-acquisition, optimal return on investment, and increased conversions.

Along with controls like campaign-level conversion setting and seasonal adjustments, value rules let you set bid adjustments for Smart Bidding to differentiate conversion values based on elements like audience, location, and device.

Trend #6: YouTube Masthead on TV Screens

There was a time when TV and the internet were mutually exclusive. No more. TV has become the fastest-growing screen for YouTube, with over 250 million hours of watch time per day.

YouTube Mastheads are digital billboards placed on your business’s YouTube homepage for 24 hours, potentially reaching 60 million viewers. Though you can’t include a CTA to a Masthead ad on TV screens, you can use them to showcase your brand, products, and services in a native video-based ad format that you can customize for optimal performance.

Trend #7: A Shift from Efficiency to Effectiveness

Rather than rely on ad efficiency, aka low cost-per-lead, marketers are now focused on online marketing effectiveness. They’re designing campaigns that eliminate poor quality leads and lower conversion rates and instead generate actual new customers and revenue. Your business can take advantage of this advertising trend by either directly integrating its CRM with Google Ads or passing data back manually. Though higher-quality leads are typically more expensive, as the leads become customers and generate revenue, you can expect your overall customer acquisition costs to trend downwards.

Trend #8: Voice Search for PPC Campaigns

Consumers are perpetually looking to save time. Creating campaigns that focus on voice search meets a current behavior trend and opens you up to massive opportunities.

Google estimates that over 25% of the global online population uses voice search on their mobile devices, and experts predict that by the end of 2022, voice commerce sales could reach $40 billion. Failing to jump onboard the PPC campaigns for voice search train could mean missing out on being featured in voice search results.

Your business can optimize its PPC campaigns for voice search with tactics like evaluating current search terms, focusing on long-tail keywords and questions phrases, identifying where a searcher is in the buying cycle, and adding or removing negative keywords. You can also invest in call extensions which allow you to add phone numbers to your ads and lets searchers call your business directly via voice search.

Trend #9: Virtual Reality Ads

Virtual reality (VR) ads let you showcase your products and services in a digital realm that mimics the real world. With the VR market expected to reach $12 billion by 2024, offering immersive experiences help you attract the mostly younger audiences who use VR. But it can also be used effectively with other demographics. For instance, 360-degree videos can help people of all ages learn more about and interact with your products, virtually “trying them out” before they purchase them.

Trend #10: Alternative PPC Platforms

There’s no denying that for years Google and Facebook have dominated the online advertising market. However, that trend is slowly changing, as more people spend time on niche platforms like LinkedIn and Amazon.

Alternative platforms marketers now consider when creating ad campaigns include:

  1. Quora. With more than 300 million monthly active users, Quora offers advertisers an opportunity to target content based on user behavior and activity on the platform. This makes it easy to influence people during the buyer’s journey consideration phase.
  2. AdRoll. AdRoll specializes in retargeting and multi-device display advertising and allows businesses to run ads on multiple channels from one place. While many people may not be familiar with it, the platform helps companies generate nearly $250 billion in sales each year.
  3. LinkedIn. LinkedIn remains the best platform for B2B companies to advertise on. With targeting options such as company, industry, job title, seniority, interests, and connections, your company can reach up to 630 million users.
  4. Amazon. Nearly 200 million people join Amazon monthly. That means eCommerce retailers have much to gain by advertising on the platform. What many business owners don’t know is that you don’t need to be a seller on Amazon to advertise your products there.
  5. Bing. Yes, Google is the king of search engines, but did you know that Bing powers 36% of desktop queries and 11.2 billion monthly searches? What more do you need to know?

How a Digital Marketing Agency Can Keep Your PPC Campaigns On-Trend

With more and more consumers searching in various and often unexpected ways, keeping on top of PPC optimizations has become a challenge for marketers. If you’re spending money on PPC ads but not getting the results you hoped for, the marketing experts at Smart WSI Marketing can work with you to turn that around.

We help businesses leverage these trends and more to get the most out of their PPC campaigns, using techniques like automation and AI to change how they run ads. If you’re ready to learn more about mastering PPC advertising for 2022, our Edmonton digital marketing agency can show you how to use current trends to keep your business competitive and profitable. Contact us today to schedule a consultation!

Lynne team member
Lynne Motkoski, Digital Marketing Strategist
Specialty: Digital Marketing Strategies
Education: MA Communications & Technology, BComm [U Alberta]
Author: The Online Marketing Handbook for Busy Entrepreneurs (coming soon)

Lynne is known for her strategic approach to marketing communications, technologies, and lead generation. She has a passion for education, keeping up with current marketing trends and practices, and helping clients keep ahead of their competition.

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