As we come to the end of what has been a very different year for all of us, it's time to think about the PPC best practices of the past few months and what we can expect for the future to further improve the performance of your paid search campaigns. Not only is this a good time to review reputable PPC best practices, but also implement new ones in PPC strategies for the future to drive your campaigns forward. Whether you use a PPC agency or have an in-house team, it's important to stay in line with the latest trends to ensure your campaign achieves the best possible results. So what's the future of PPC best practices and what has 2020 taught us?
Budget reviews
Unfortunately, advertisers can sometimes get stuck in a routine and forget to reassess and revise the distribution of their media budget. When managing your reviews, you should consider whether low-performing campaigns that have been optimized throughout the year should be eliminated to free up budgets for other campaigns. Competition metrics should be examined to identify if there is any additional traffic that can be captured that will help grow results for winning campaigns.
Try new platforms and features
One of the best PPC practices you should adopt is to test new paid platforms and go beyond your comfort zones. Some advertising platforms you might consider include Pinterest, Snapchat, and LinkedIn. If you have yet to use many of the features at your disposal, you should take some time to test them as you may find one that will benefit your campaign.
Understand the journey of your audience and buyers
It is important that you look at the entire image of the audience you are targeting. In 2021, the most successful PPC marketers will focus on their target audience as part of their strategy. Advertisers who align their PPC marketing efforts with the buyer's journey will be ahead of the curve in 2021. This can be achieved by thinking about the customer and their method when deciding to buy from you. Consider the following: what they might be looking for Where they interact How long the buying process takes Marketers need to evolve their approach and think about engaging the right audience; two important areas for reaching your customers are keywords and images.
Power of first party data
It has been suggested by industry experts that the way data is captured is about to be disrupted. This is due to restrictions on third party cookies in browsers and changes to global privacy policies. Some specialists have even claimed that search engines don't want you to keep track of anything significant in the future. Therefore, it is important that you are able to retrieve some of your traffic data.
Perfect advertising messages
In 2021 it will be more and more important to articulate your message and it will be more valuable to write good ads rather than bad ones. 2021 will be the year to focus on who your customers are as people, rather than just data! Having the right person at the right time but with the wrong message is a completely lost opportunity. What drives that emotional connection and engages someone depends on creativity. Therefore, ad writing and running skills have never been more important.
The mobile experience is important
If brands want to be successful in 2021, they need to have an accessible site, which will be a huge goal next year. There are still so many brands that don't have a website with a good mobile experience, and so many people have never visited their site on a mobile device. Therefore, test and review the mobile experience, especially as many more people are using their mobile devices instead of using desktops and that will continue into the next year.
Re-evaluate how you report
You may have been using the same performance report for years. While it may work well, it's time to reevaluate key PPC metrics and add that data to your reports. For example, this year Google actually removed the average position metric and now suggests using either the top impression rate in search or the absolute top impression rate in search instead. Whether you're using Google Ads or Microsoft Ads, they both have overview pages with helpful charts if you need them quickly. As you reevaluate your reports, you should check if you are still using the data, if the information is usable, and what new metrics you might add. There is only reason to add new data if it is usable and will be useful when making account decisions. Hopefully, this short guide has given you some insight into what PPC best practices will look like next year and what trends and methods you should continue to implement in 2021.
