For all PPC advertisers in 2024, trends and challenges are already beginning to take shape. Most of these are being dictated by changes in the data and privacy landscapes in addition to ongoing economic challenges. However, what are those obstacles, and how can we anticipate and address them? These are the top five that I anticipate for the remainder of the year.

Audience focus

Website data coverage will decline as third-party cookies are phased out and consent policies become more stringent, which will lessen your power. This implies that remarketing audiences will eventually decline and that the effectiveness of these ads will decline. First-party information will be more crucial than before. The drawback is that we now depend more on businesses and customers to interact with us and provide data. It's our responsibility to educate those who don't grasp the importance. First-party numbers will be much smaller than GA4 audiences, Google Ads remarketing audiences, and Meta custom audiences. As a result, the direct use of that data as a campaign-level targeted audience will change, and it will become more of an element to improve the automated features and smart bidding of your account.

Account enhancement

Over the past few years, your daily campaign optimisation has seen a significant change. Negative keywords are still crucial, but they don't take as much time as they used to because of the advancements in Smart Bidding. Performance Max has introduced an alternative method for campaign analysis and optimisation. Furthermore, the number of campaign types with little to no targeting input and knowledge is growing, with the new Demand Gen campaign type recently giving Performance Max a run for its money in the popular Google kid category. We spend less time on the Google Ads accounts attempting to enhance performance, especially for Performance Max. Google is aware of this, which is why it has been adding growth reporting capabilities over the past few years, like the shopping experience scorecard, best seller reports, and price competitiveness report. Important resources for the broader approach assistance Google wishes us to adopt. However, with the impending complete migration to Google Merchant Centre Next—which is purportedly a more straightforward method for retailers to manage their feeds—change is on the horizon. It's another experience that advertising will need to get used to.

Content

The emphasis on content in search has changed significantly over the past few years, just like everything else on this list. Standard text advertising were followed by extended text advertisements and finally the responsive search ads ad type. The quantity of bespoke versions has decreased despite the increase in names and descriptions. Endless ad groups devoted to a single keyword are not necessary for campaigns, nor should they be. Since we at Performance continue to have doubts about Google's use of our creative, we frequently defy industry standards in order to regain some control over feed-only asset groups. It may seem unnerving to let Google decide which titles and descriptions rank highest, but this is increasingly the case. Being able to stand out is becoming more and more important as all advertising platforms go towards AI content generation. For the foreseeable future, artificial intelligence (AI) will play a significant part in PPC (again, this is a topic for another post), but those who use AI for everyday chores that save time and guidance on content development will succeed and stand out from the crowd.

Monitoring

When it came to this much simpler practice, most of us just put our heads in the sand and trusted web developers to handle it. We still rely on such technical assistance, especially for the more sophisticated conversion functions. Advertisers need to be more informed and proactive, though, as accounts depend more than ever on precise conversion statistics and an ever-expanding array of tracking tools. With the GA4 migration and a larger emphasis on Enhanced conversions, 2023 was a significant year. This also applies to offline conversion monitoring, profit tracking, and consent mode V2, which is a personal favourite of mine. More than 90% of e-commerce accounts optimise for revenue or return on assets (ROAS), even though neither is the primary goal for many of those organisations. This is where the opportunity is. Conversion tags that report on profit just per transaction can be created using some third-party technologies (like Profit Metrics). At the campaign level, you can then optimise for profit on advertising expenditure. For many accounts, this might be a game-changer, and I see a steady increase in the adoption of this kind of tracking software.

Reporting

I've already mentioned the ongoing challenges we face with the performance black box. Over the past year, Google has made several improvements to its insight reporting, and Mike Rhodes' fantastic Performance Max script is still improving and benefiting us all. However, with the introduction of AI functions, there is concern that Google may continue to bury some information in order to prevent criticism. How reliable will this data be with increased consent mode coverage and remodelling in place, even with account-level conversions? And how would GA4 be affected if fewer people choose to opt out of cookie monitoring and there is less audience coverage here? As Google intended, the new, strategically-focused reporting within Google Merchant Centre (GMC) makes up for what we lose from a tactical standpoint within the reporting of the Google Ads platform. There are also more discussions about where our product's prices are placed in comparison to the market or what product catalogue prospects there are to lean into based on the top shopping data, rather than what search phrases have come via a particular campaign. Discussions that most shops would rather have since they are the more important ones that aid in their growth.

Customers will look to their agency and independent contractors for support during this difficult economic time and advertising campaign. Chaos presents an opportunity, and those who seize it will be those who can adapt and welcome the changes.

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