7 PPC Trends to Stay Ahead of the Curve in 2016 & Beyond

So far this year, we’ve seen the rise of many new audience targeting trends that are helping businesses reach out to their target buyers and more effectively market their products and services.

From persona targeting to remarketing ads and many other new trends already spreading like wildfire, it’s no wonder paid search advertising continues to be the buzzword for businesses looking to tap into the world’s largest market – the Internet.

 

But here’s the brutal truth about paid search marketing:

There are WAY too many marketers and businesses that just follow the conventional wisdom readily available on the Internet.

If only it were that easy…

If you’re serious about paid search advertising, you’ll need to be embrace the trends of tomorrow to stay ahead in the game. That’s why we decided to hand-pick a list of seven PPC trends of tomorrow to help you stay ahead of the curve in 2016 and beyond.

So, let’s begin, shall we?

Trend #1: Google Adwords Re-Enables Mobile-Base Bidding

In a recent development, Google announced a significant change in order to ensure greater control for users over device-level bidding in AdWords. With its recent announcement, Google has made it clear that tablet bidding is back, and that base bids will now apply to mobile with bid modifiers set for desktop and/or tablet.

 

This means that now businesses and marketers will be able to anchor their base keyword to the devices relevant to their business. They can then easily set bid adjustments for other devices. In addition, marketers will now be able to adjust bids up to +900%, which has been increased from +300%. 

It’s important to understand that device bidding will apply to ALL campaign types. This is true even when keyword targeting is not being used, as in Shopping campaigns, for example.

Mobile and tablet usage is finally outpacing desktop usage (after years of speculation and hand-wringing), and this realization is pushing a lot of marketers and businesses to change the way they conceptualize and create ads for their target audiences.

Trend #2: Responsive Ads to Be Featured in the Display Network

In another recent development, Google announced the introduction of new, responsive ads for display. This means that you can now go for dynamic, responsive ads that will automatically resize and adjust to match the look and feel of the content your target audience is browsing.

 

Image via PPCNI

Built dynamically by Google, these responsive ads automatically fit available ad spaces on the Google Display Network. All you need to do is to provide a marketing image, a short headline, a long headline, a description, and an optional name and custom logo design. That’s it! Google will do all the hard work for you.

Trend #3: More Characters for Text Search Ads on All Devices 

Google recently launched Expanded Text Ads, a new formatting option that offers advertisers more room for ad copy. Essentially, Expanded Text Ads effectively double the size of PPC ads on AdWords, meaning that advertisers have more opportunities to entice prospects with their ads.

 

Image via PPC Hero

Not so long ago, Google raised eyebrows by removing text ads from the right hand side of the SERPs. Now that these ads aren’t there anymore, Google can now streamline its text ad formats across both mobile and desktop.

Soon, advertisers will be able to use two 30-character headlines as against the present 25-character headline. In addition, the updates mean that advertisers now have access to an 80-character limit for description copy instead of the earlier two 35-character lines.

And that’s not all! The display URLs will automatically pull the landing page domain, but advertisers will be able to name up to two directory paths — neither of which has to be a real navigational path — to provide description about the landing page content.

Trend #4: Shopping Feed Update Will Impact PPC Campaigns

On May 25, 2016, Google announced vital updates to its Shopping Products Feed Specification. These updates meant changes to the information that Google requires from advertisers in order to run Shopping ads.

 

Now, Unit Pricing will be available for all markets and categories in a bid to ensure consistency in the displayed prices. Color and Size values will now be compulsory to ensure a better, more consistent shopping experience for users.

The minimum image size requirements for non-apparel products will be increased from 32 x 32 to 100 x 100 pixels to be able to support new ad formats better. The minimum image size for apparel images will remain 250 x 250 pixels.

The maximum feed file size will also be increased from 1 GB to 4 GB. This means going forward, you’ll be able to use larger, high-quality images (file size as large as 800 x 800 pixels or larger) to ensure better performance. This is sure to be a winning trend that will help you ensure that your ads feature the most accurate prices, specifications, and availability information – and plenty of gorgeous, high-resolution imagery! 

Trend #5: Video Ad Campaigns will Rule the Roost

Here’s another 2015 trend on the list that looks to be going strong in 2016. Video ads have become increasingly popular among marketers and businesses. With Google and Facebook focusing more on video ads, it’s no wonder why video ads have become very much a part of the mainstream advertising medium.

 

Image via Marketing Land

Today, ever-so-connected and ever-so-busy users often like to watch more than read. Therefore, presenting your ads in video format can get you more eyes and more clicks compared to plain old text ads.

Contrary to common misconception, creating video ad campaigns can be economical. You don’t need any special technical skills to actually run video adverts (though you’ll still need at least a rudimentary understanding of video production techniques and the equipment to do it, if you plan on producing your own video ads) and you can easily manage it through AdWords. It was a major win for us last year and will be again this year and beyond.

Trend #6: Interactive Advertising Will Be the New Normal

Today’s consumers are smarter than ever. They look for – and essentially demand – to experience the products and services from brands before they spend money on it, and Google seems to be serious about making it possible for its app users.

 

Image via Media Post

Did you know that 1 in 4 apps listed on Google’s Play Store have never been used? This realization is pushing Google to use its virtual machines on its cloud platform to enable users to use an app for at least 60 seconds before downloading it. This will help users decide if they actually want to download the app or not. Great for users, not so great for the developers of the millions of mediocre apps out there.

This is arguably the most audacious of our 2016 PPC trend predictions. Soon, advertisers will help users experience their products before they actually purchase them. This implies that more and more advertisers will utilize interactive ads to showcase their products to their prospects and consumers.

This also means we’ll soon see more and more interactive ads that will allow users to experience products before spending their hard-earned cash on them.

Trend #7: RLSA Will Steal the Limelight

Though launched officially in 2013, RLSA (Remarketing Lists for Search Ads) have not yet been fully explored by many marketers yet. However, we’re confident that many marketers will reap the benefits from RLSA once they realize the potential returns that RLSA offers.

 

RLSA gets you access to an extensive list of search ads where you can select ads for products and services similar to yours. You can then modify search ads, bids, and keywords.

It also helps you review the returning visitor data right from your AdWords dashboard to analyze your users’ behavior. This information will provide greater insights into and control over your paid search budget.

For example, if you know that your returning visitors are converting at a higher cost-per-acquisition against first-time visitors, you can easily lower the bid on your search ads for this audience. On the other hand, if you find that your returning visitors are converting at a lower cost, you can increase bids for them.

About the Author

Nancy Kapoor is a blogger and digital marketing expert at Design Hill, the world’s fastest-growing crowdsourcing platform for custom web and graphic design. Nancy has spent more than seven years working in SEO, email marketing, paid marketing, affiliate marketing, digital marketing, blogging, and content marketing.

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How To Support Data with Real-Life Interviews – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by rcancino

With all the data that today’s marketers can access, there’s often still no substitute for the quality of information you can get from interviewing real people. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, we welcome Rebekah Cancino — a partner at Phoenix-based Onward and #MozCon 2016 speaker — to teach us the whys and hows of great interviews.

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Video Transcription

Hi, Moz fans. I’m Rebekah Cancino. I’m a partner at Onward, and I lead content strategy and user experience design. Today I’m here to talk to you about how to support the data you have, your keyword data, data around search intent, analytics with real life user interviews.

So recently, Rand has been talking a little more about the relationship between user experience design and SEO, whether it’s managing the tensions between the two or the importance of understanding the path to customer purchase. He said that in order to understand that path, we have to talk to real people. We have to do interviews, whether that’s talking to actual users or maybe just people inside your company that have an understanding of the psychographics and the demographics of your target audience, so people like sales folks or customer service reps.

Now, maybe you’re a super data-driven marketer and you haven’t felt the need to talk to real people and do interviews in the past, or maybe you have done user interviews and you found that you got a bunch of obvious insights and it was a huge waste of time and money.

I’m here to tell you that coupling your data with real interviews is always going to give you better results. But having interviews that are useful can be a little bit tricky. The interviews that you do are only as good as the questions you ask and the approach that you take. So I want to make sure that you’re all set and prepared to have really good user interviews. All it takes is a little practice and preparation.

It’s helpful to think of it like this. So the data is kind of telling us what happened. It can tell us about online behaviors, things like keywords, keyword volume, search intent. We can use tools, like KeywordTool.io or Ubersuggest or even Moz’s Keyword Explorer, to start to understand that.

We can look at our analytics, entry and exit pages, bounces, pages that get a lot of views, all of that stuff really important and we can learn a lot from it. But with our interviews, what we’re learning about is the why.

This is the stuff that online data just can’t tell us. This is about those offline behaviors, the emotions, beliefs, attitudes that drive the behaviors and ultimately the purchase decisions. So these two things working together can help us get a really great picture of the whole story and make smarter decisions.

So say, for example, you have an online retailer. They sell mainly chocolate-dipped berries. They’ve done their homework. They’ve seen that most of the keywords people are using tend to be something like “chocolate dipped strawberries gifts” or “chocolate dipped strawberries delivered.” And they’ve done the work to make sure that they’ve done their on-page optimization and doing a lot of other smart things too using that.

But then they also noticed that their Mother’s Day packages and their graduation gifts are not doing so well. They’re starting to see a lot of drop-offs around that product description page and a higher cart abandonment rate than usual.

Now, given the data they had, they might make decisions like, “Well, let’s see if we can do a little more on-page keyword optimization to reflect what’s special about the graduation and Mother’s Day gifts, or maybe we can refine the user experience of the checkout process. But if they talk to some real users — which they did, this is a real story — they might learn that people who send food gift items, they worry about: Is the person I’m sending the gift to, are they going to be home when this gift arrives? Because this is a perishable item, like chocolate-dipped berries, will it melt?

Now, this company, they do a lot of work to protect the berries. The box that they arrive in is super insulated. It’s like its own cooler. They have really great content that tells that story. The problem is that content is buried in the FAQs instead of on the pages in places it matters most — the product detail, the checkout flow.

So you can see here how there’s an opportunity to use the data and the interview insights together to make smarter decisions. You can get to insights like that for your organization too. Let’s talk about some tips that are going to help you make smarter interview decisions.

So the first one is to talk to a spectrum of users who represent your ideal audience. Maybe, like with this berry example, their ideal customer tends to skew slightly female. You would want that group of people, that you’re talking to, to skew that way too. Perhaps they have a little more disposable income. That should be reflected in the group of people that you’re interviewing and so forth. You get it.

The next one is to ask day-in-the-life, open-ended questions. This is really important. If you ask typical marketing questions like, “How likely are you to do this or that?” or, “Tell me on a scale of 1 to 10 how great this was,” you’ll get typical marketing answers. What we want is real nuanced answers that tell us about someone’s real experience.

So I’ll ask questions like, “Tell me about the last time you bought a food gift online? What was that like?” We’re trying to get that person to walk us through their journey from the minute they’re considering something to how they vet the solutions to actually making that purchase decision.

Next is don’t influence the answers. You don’t want to bias someone’s response by introducing an idea. So I wouldn’t say something like, “Tell me about the last time you bought a food gift online. Were you worried that it would spoil?” Now I’ve set them on a path that maybe they wouldn’t have gone on to begin with. It’s much better to let that story unfold naturally.

Moving on, dig deeper. Uncover the why, really important. Maybe when you’re talking to people you realize that they like to cook and by sharing a food item gift with someone who’s far away, they can feel closer to them. Maybe they like gifts to reflect how thoughtful they are or what good tastes they have. You always want to uncover the underlying motives behind the actions people are taking.

So don’t be too rushed in skipping to the next question. If you hear something that’s a little bit vague or maybe you see a point that’s interesting, follow up with some probes. Ask things like, “Tell me more about that,” or, “Why is that? What did you like about it?” and so on.

Next, listen more than you talk. You have maybe 30 to 45 minutes max with each one of these interviews. You don’t want to waste time by inserting yourself into their story. If that happens, it’s cool, totally natural. Just find a way to back yourself out of that and bring the focus back to the person you’re interviewing as quickly and naturally as possible.

Take note of phrases and words that they use. Do they say things like “dipped berries” instead of “chocolate-dipped strawberries?” You want to pay attention to the different ways and phrases that they use. Are there regional differences? What kinds of words do they use to describe your product or service or experience? Are the berries fun, decadent, luxurious? By learning what kind of language and vocabulary people use, you can have copy, meta descriptions, emails that take that into account and reflect that.

Find the friction. So in every experience that we have, there’s always something that’s kind of challenging. We want to get to the bottom of that with our users so we can find ways to mitigate that point of friction earlier on in the journey. So I might ask someone a question like, “What’s the most challenging thing about the last time you bought a food gift?”

If that doesn’t kind of spark an idea with them, I might say something even a little more broad, like, “Tell me about a time you were really disappointed in a gift that you bought or a food gift that you bought,” and see where that takes them.

Be prepared. Great interviews don’t happen by accident. Coming up with all these questions takes time and preparation. You want to put a lot of thought into them. By asking questions that tell me about the nature of the whole journey, you want to be clear about your priorities. Know which questions are most important to you and know which ones are must have pieces of information. That way you can use your time wisely while you still let the conversation flow where it takes you.

Finally, relax and breathe. The people you’re interviewing are only going to be as relaxed as you are. If you’re stiff or overly formal or treating this like it’s a chore and you’re bored, they’re going to pick up on that energy and they’re probably not going to feel comfortable sharing their thoughts with you, or there won’t be space for that to happen.

Make sure you let them know ahead of time, like, “Hey, feel free to be honest. These answers aren’t going to be shared in a way that can be attributed directly to you, just an aggregate.”

And have fun with it. Be genuinely curious and excited about what you’re going to learn. They’ll appreciate that too.

So once you’ve kind of finished and you’ve wrapped up those interviews, take a step back. Don’t get too focused or caught up on just one of the results. You want to kind of look at the data in aggregate, the qualitative data and let it talk to you.

What stories are there? Are you seeing any patterns or themes that you can take note of, kind of like the theme around people being worried about the berries melting? Then you can organize those findings and make sure you summarize it and synthesize it in a way that the people who have to use those insights that you’ve gotten can make sense of.

Make sure that you tell real stories and humanize this information. Maybe you recorded the interviews, which is always a really good idea. You can go back and pull out little sound bites or clips of the people saying these really impactful things and use that when you’re presenting the data.

So going back to that berry example, if you recall, we had that data around: Hey, we’re seeing a lot of drop-offs on the product description page. We’re seeing a higher cart abandonment rate. But maybe during the user interviews, we noticed a theme of people talking about how they obsessively click the tracking link on the packages, or they wait for those gift recipients to send them a text message to say, “Hey, I got this present.” As you kind of unraveled why, you noticed that it had to do with the fact that these berries might melt and they’re worried about that.

Well, now you can elevate the content that you have around how those berries are protected in a little cooler-like box on the pages and the places it matters most. So maybe there’s a video or an animated GIF that shows people how the berries are protected, right there in the checkout flow.

I hope that this encourages you to get out there and talk to real users, find out about their context and use that information to really elevate your search data. It’s not about having a big sample size or a huge survey. It’s much more about getting to real life experiences around your product or service that adds depth to the data that you have. In doing that, hopefully you’ll be able to increase some conversions and maybe even improve behavioral metrics, so those UX metrics that, I don’t know, theoretically could lead to higher organic visibility anyway.

That’s all for now. Thanks so much. Take care.

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