As always, we’ve pulled together some of the biggest names in PPC to bring you our annual predictions eBook, this year presented as, “Digital and Local Marketing Predictions: 2016, The Year of Audience Targeting in PPC.”
To get you pumped for tomorrow’s release, we’re sharing a quick preview of the eBook, featuring one of the fourteen expert predictions. So take a look!
More Demand for PPC from SMBs
Early adoption of AdWords was driven by small, scrappy advertisers who now long for the old days before CPCs skyrocketed, large advertisers came to dominate search results, and AdWords became more complex.
In 2016 we’ll see several efforts from Google to make it easier for small companies to run more effective PPC campaigns.
- Local shops will see improvements to the Google Merchant Center where it will become easier to submit and manage small product feeds. AdWords will make it easier to turn these feeds into shopping ads which already account for 1 in 3 clicks for retailers. I predict they will integrate tools for retailers in Google My Business, their portal for local businesses.
- Google Shopping Express will make it easier for small shops to start offering their inventory for sale on Google’s same-day delivery shopping service. Google wins when they have more inventory and more competitive prices than Amazon, and retailers win when their existing stores can increase sales through a new channel.
- When competing in a world of higher CPCs, it’s more important than ever to understand the full value of search ads in order to be able to set competitive bids. Google will make it easier to understand the full value with continued enhancements to conversion tracking and attribution modeling. They will make it easier for every advertiser to decide for themselves how much value should be assigned to each type of interaction whether they be calls, offline sales, requests for directions, etc.
- We’ll see new specialty ad formats from Google. In 2015 AdWords launched new comparison ads (for mortgages) and home service ads (for locksmiths and plumbers) and these types of ads will be rolled out to more areas and for more types of companies because these ad formats work better than 95 characters of text.
- Video ads are cheap compared with search ads so they present a great opportunity for small businesses to connect with prospective buyers. In 2015 video ads became better integrated in AdWords and in 2016 I predict we’ll see new ways to advertise to YouTube’s massive audience through AdWords.
Frederick’s prediction just scratches the surface, if you want to see what all the experts had to say, be sure to download our ebook once it’s released, December 17th, 2015.