PPC Advertising - 7 Trend to Know About

Every year trends help define the marketplace in digital advertising. With the need to become more visible and reach more customers, digital advertising continues to advance technologically to support consumer demand for a more integrated experience. We suggest advertisers should currently be aware of the following trends in regards to this demand.

#1  Audience Targeting - Google spent much of 2017 rolling out new audience targeting features. It’s believed the primary reason for this is to offer robust automation beginning in 2018.

#2  More Targeted Ads With Specific Purpose - Advertisers are learning that single purpose ads cut through minimal attention spans. Ads will become more singularly purposed in nature, with a very specific goal and goal conversion place in mind.

#3  Artificial Intelligence - The most interesting use of AI, is in creative. All major platforms benefit if CTR increases, yet many advertisers do not have a structured process for ad creation and testing. Things like Dynamic Search Ads from Google and Dynamic Creative from Facebook are examples of new applications of AI for creative in 2018.

#4  Voice - Amazon is working on making big strides to monetize voice search with Alexa ads. This advertising is focused on big brand advertisers, like Clorox and P&G. For now, keyword additions will allow most advertisers to target voice queries and thus capitalizing on the increase in volume. See our Voice Search article on page 5.

#5 Contextual Targeting It will be more complicated for ad tech vendors to track user behaviors with cookies. Audience targeting strategies will be replaced by contextual targeting strategies. Advertisers will need to understand the context of each web page for targeting and brand safety purposes.

# 6 eCommerce - For advertisers, it's advantageous to decide where Amazon fits. Do you join them potentially creating competition for yourself or do you ignore them; choosing to fight the largest eCommerce platform? We’ve seen evidence that advertising through Amazon is the right path for many businesses.

#7 Chrome - The launch of the built-in ad blocker is slated for mid-February. The impact for most is expected to be low.

Bottom Line: The main trend drivers are the big players desire to capture more demand and increase CPC rates. Trends that meet these criteria will most likely become “permanent” features on major advertising platforms.