Choosing Your Keyword Champion: Setting Yourself Up For Success In the Auction via @sejournal, @navahf

Whether you’re focusing on organic content strategy or deciding which Google or Microsoft keywords to bid on, keywords are a central part of digital marketing.

Knowing which keywords to go after and which to hold off on can make or break the marketing budget.

Here are a few considerations when choosing your keyword champion:

• How competitive is the keyword?
• Is the keyword focused on high-value prospects or customers?
• Are there cheaper traffic options?

While keyword theory has many moving parts, these three represent the biggest impact areas.

The ideas we’ll discuss apply to both Google and Microsoft, however the examples will be mostly Google-driven.

How Competitive Is The Keyword

Both organic and paid search markets need to factor in how competitive a keyword is.

Whether you’re vying for the top spot in the search engine result page (SERP) or contending with expensive auction prices, a high-competition keyword can break the bank.

However, if it’s a mission-critical one, you may not have a choice.

While going niche or longtail can mitigate some of this, only going for low search volume ideas can stunt growth.

As a general rule, paid keywords should be fairly close to each other in auction price.

This is because budgets are set at the campaign level, and you want to make sure you can fit enough clicks in your day to generate leads/sales.

For example, if a lawyer is going after personal injury leads, they might bid on/build content around:

• “Personal injury lawyers near me.”
• “Hurt in an injury need a lawyer.”
• “Car accident lawyer do I have a case?”

All three are longtail, yet they represent different levels of client “readiness.”

If one of the variants has a high auction price or has an overly competitive SERP, it could be useful to swap out “attorney” for “lawyer.”

In The Paid World, There Are A Few Ways To Identify Which Keyword Concepts Might Be High Or Low Competition

• Dynamic Search Ads (DSA): Allow Google/Microsoft’s crawling of your feed to tell you which ideas are popular and which are low volume. Additionally, you can audit the auction price of ideas before you commit to them.
• PMax Search Themes: PMax has URL expansion (a form of DSA), but the real exploratory power is in Search Themes. Search Themes can outrank traditional keywords if they’re on broad or phrase match. They will always lose if the keyword is on exact. Seeing the auction prices for PMax and how often it’s winning can help you make the best choice for your keyword champion.
• Broad match: Broad match has improved quite a bit, and one of its best use cases is to uncover new and profitable ways people search. You just need to make sure no one is

Is The Keyword Focused On High-Value Customers?

Return on investment, or ROI, is one of the universal key performance indicators (KPIs) and guiding light metrics.

Syncing in conversion value can help guide bidding strategies and make meaningful campaign decisions.

Yet not enough people factor this data in, which means keywords can look like they’re driving big value when they’re actually just creating noise.

By setting conversion values (which can be placeholder numbers), you can see which keywords are driving higher value.

Another important step is to use primary and secondary conversions.

By ensuring lower-value actions don’t count as conversions in reporting and bidding, you’ll ensure big-volume keywords don’t represent false positives.

When these guardrails are in place, factoring in conversion value against CPA (cost per acquisition) can help save or condemn expensive keywords.

Cheaper Traffic Options

Sometimes, a keyword is just too expensive. Forcing a keyword to work with a misaligned budget is asking for a failed campaign.

The first step should be looking to close variants. Sometimes, a close variant represents the lion-share of how you’re getting the traffic anyway.

By bidding on it directly (and accounting for it in your ad creative), you can get a better quality score.

However, if the keyword and all its variants are out of your price range, consider more visual channels to generate traffic. This applies to SEO pros as well.

A big part of how search is created is through visual inputs.

By building out video content and engaging with social communities, you can inspire new ways of searching and benefit from less competitive markets.

Final Takeaways

Do not set and forget keywords.

Be sure to challenge your keyword champions to confirm they’re the right ones for you.

More resources:

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Featured Image: fizkes/Shutterstock

New Developments In PPC: Experts Weigh In via @sejournal, @BennyJamminS

This is an excerpt from SEJ’s PPC Trends 2024 ebook, our annual roundup of expert opinions on what you can expect over the course of the next 12 months. 

With all the potential challenges on the horizon for 2024, diversification – embracing new developments, user behaviors, and channels – is one way you can insulate your businesses from disruption.

Adding more channels and sources of data requires:

• Clear cross-platform strategy, messaging, and identity.
• Willingness to experiment to discover positive and negative outcomes.
• Buy-in from stakeholders to be flexible about key performance indicators (KPIs) – and be willing to engage in activity that’s more difficult to measure directly.

So, this is a section about leaning into change, but in service of marketing strategies that have always been effective.

If I had to summarize the key insights of this article in three sentences, they would be:

• Meet people where they are isn’t a new concept, but it will require you to learn new platforms and new ways of engagement.
• Stubborn adherence to one channel or one data source won’t work: You need new channels, new sources of data, and a model to draw insights from various sources.
• Embrace the new in service of what you’ve always known about marketing.

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Meet Users Where They Are & Engage Them In New Ways

Alex Macura, Founder/CEO, Your Digital Assembly

Leveraging User-Generated Content

In the age of personalization, what’s more customized than user-generated content (UGC)? Any time a customer shares their experience and reviews your product or service, that’s authentic feedback that can be leveraged to propel your brand even further.

It’s this kind of genuine relationship between customer and brand that encourages interaction and can help bring new customers on board. Content creation on social media is an excellent source of engagement and exposure, with the power to make your brand go viral.

If you’re able to establish that level of connection with your customers and create an organic, loyal community, that’s value you can bank on.

The Rise Of Online Video Shopping

Want to increase your engagement while giving customers convenient, real-time access to your products? That’s the power of online video shopping – the influencer marketing strategy that allows your customers to browse, shop, and purchase – all via a dynamic, engaging live stream.

Live video shopping is primarily done through influencers on social media platforms. This makes it a powerful opportunity to build your brand presence on social media. Influencers bring an audience, but instead of simply providing a link with a code, users can buy directly through the platform right there and then.

Given its relative newness, taking your shopping experience to influencer livestreams can help you stand out from competitors and give you the edge you’re looking for. But you will need to prepare carefully to make online video shopping a success.

The Future Of Marketing

What does 2024 hold for marketing trends? We’ll find out in a few short months. Which trends will work for your brand?

You’ll have to discover that for yourself. But don’t waste any time – you don’t want to be left behind.

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Create Holistic Strategies & Cohesive Messaging To Win In The Attention Economy

Amalia Fowler, Principal Strategist, Good AF Consulting

For 2024, the focus needs to be both on the overall media mix and accurate measurement. We should see a trend towards more holistic planning, looking at the integration between platforms and optimizing for an overall marketing goal, instead of laser focus on individual platform key performance indicators (KPIs).

For example, if you are using search ads only but not running social or video, you’re missing opportunities at the beginning of the user journey. Consider owned properties, too. If marketers are siloing their thinking and efforts by only looking on-platform, they’re missing out on optimization opportunities elsewhere.

To cut through the noise and stand out in the attention economy, marketers need a cohesive media mix with messaging that meets users’ needs at each stage of their journey – across paid, owned, and earned marketing efforts.

It is not simply about platform choice, but also ad messaging, specific calls-to-action, and ensuring message match from channel to channel, and ad to landing page.

Finally, if you aren’t accurately measuring any of the above, you will run into considerable issues.

The forced adoption of GA4 and continued discussions around tracking mean importing offline conversions, and the use of tools like UTM tags are more important than ever.

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Lean Into Privacy-First Advertising & Measurement

Ben Wood, Director of Growth & Innovation, Hallam

A key trend that will continue into 2024 and beyond is privacy-first measurement and advertising: serving targeted ads without disclosing users’ information. With Google finally set to phase out third-party cookies in 2024, we’ll see more advertisers trialing contextual advertising to get ahead.

We’ve already seen major brands such as the Guardian, Bauer, and Haymarket teaming up to run a large-scale test of a privacy-enhancing technology for ‘post cookie’ advertising, and this will ripple down to smaller advertisers in the year ahead as the effectiveness of third-party targeting options starts to fizzle out. This is also the focus of the Privacy Sandbox project.

We’ll continue to see challenges around measurement.

Multi-touch attribution often attributes too much weight to lower-funnel advertising tactics and fails to recognize the value of brand and upper-funnel advertising investments.

I expect to see more advertisers trial alternative tactics such as media mix modeling (econometrics) and incrementality experiments to triangulate return on investment (ROI).

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Embrace New Models Of Audience Targeting & New Channels

Ginny Marvin, Ads Product Liaison, Google

Privacy, Audiences And Consented, First-Party Data

With the coming deprecation of third-party cookies and greater privacy regulations and expectations, having a first-party data strategy is even more valuable and important now, and going into 2024.

These shifts are already changing how we think about audience targeting, for example. Similar audiences sunset in August 2023. First-party audience segments can be used instead as a signal in optimized targeting, audience expansion, and Smart Bidding to reach relevant audiences and measure in privacy-centric ways.

Using your first-party data also needs to be easier. New tools will help businesses more easily use their consented first-party data – regardless of where it is stored.

Speaking of analytics, Google Analytics 4 was built with privacy at its core. That makes it more resilient to privacy changes that cause less user data to be observable via cookies, and more data being aggregated to protect user anonymity. When accounts have sufficient data, GA4 uses AI to build predictive audiences that can be used in Ads campaigns.

Video, Video, Video

Whether it’s in short form on mobile or long form on TV, video keeps growing. Video has traditionally been used by brand marketers to drive awareness, but some incredibly talented marketers have been successfully using video to drive performance.

Expect to see brand marketers move down the funnel and use video to drive performance, and to see performance advertisers continue using video to drive performance, and also move up the funnel to drive more awareness goals.

And, of course, AI will also help with video creation – it can already automatically reformat horizontal video ads to vertical or square videos, for example!

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Mind Meld With GA4 & Embrace New Data Models

Lisa Raehsler, Founder and SEM Strategy Consultant, Big Click Co.

The migration to GA4 has been chaotic for some advertisers but should level out and become more useful in 2024.

Even though most advertisers have migrated to the new version of GA4, many still need to customize it to use its full power to extract the most actionable data. This is invaluable for paid search efforts and optimizing strategies, budgets, and creatives across all digital platforms such as display, video, shopping, social media, and retargeting.

The events-based model gives more in-depth, full insights into traffic acquisition, audiences, and engagement from PPC and other channels.

Advertisers who mind-meld, embrace, and excel at this new model will have a competitive advantage and improve performance across digital channels.

More resources:

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Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

PPC Experts On AI In PPC: Potential & Limitations via @sejournal, @BennyJamminS

This is an excerpt from SEJ’s PPC Trends 2024 ebook, our annual roundup of expert opinions on what you can expect over the course of the next 12 months. 

This year, new AI features rolled out on PPC platforms, and marketers began adopting generative AI in earnest.

The dust is settling after the initial exuberance about AI, and we’re starting to see more nuanced and cautionary opinions develop.

In this section, you’ll see contributors highlighting the benefits of both AI-powered automated ad campaigns and adopting generative AI in your workflow.

You’ll also see cautionary words, reminding you that human thinking and creativity still drive online interactions.

If I had to summarize these insights in three sentences, they would be;

• AI is very good at the things it’s good at, and very bad at the things it’s bad at.
• AI is a square peg, so beware of round holes; AI is not a panacea.
• AI can be a multiplier of productivity and results, but some processes are worth the difficulty.

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How AI Can Improve Social Media Advertising Performance

Akvile DeFazio, Founder, AKvertise

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is quickly becoming an integral part of the advertising industry, transforming how companies reach their target audience and how advertisers increase effectiveness and efficiency in managing ad accounts.

Here are some ways AI can help drive more results in 2024:

Targeting Improvements

Just a few short years ago, campaigns and ad sets were set up more granularly, but after iOS updates, Meta launched several new machine learning options that advertisers can leverage for better results and find their customers.

Now, in Meta Ads Manager, there are Advantage+ Audiences that leverage machine learning to help advertisers reach the most valuable audiences much faster.

By enabling this, you can also share an audience suggestion, such as recent purchasers, so then the system can prioritize people matching using this high-value audience profile before expanding the targeting net wider.

If you work in ecommerce, Meta’s Advantage+ shopping campaigns can help find new customers using its automatic placements, lowest-cost bid strategies, and more by serving the best ads to the people most likely to convert using its AI.

Creative Optimization

When it comes to creative optimization, particularly on platforms like Meta Ads, running dynamic ads with various creatives can be highly effective.

Platforms like Meta leverage AI to serve your target audience with the most relevant creative content, increasing the likelihood of achieving your campaign optimization goals.

By trusting the system to determine the best approach, you can expect improved and faster results compared to manual testing by humans.

In this past year, its performance has improved significantly, and I believe it will continue to do so.

Measuring Results

AI also offers extensive analytics and reporting capabilities, enabling advertisers to measure the success of their campaigns accurately.

With data-driven insights, advertisers can identify the most effective ads and targeting strategies, enabling them to make informed decisions for optimizing campaigns.

We use tools that allow us to import data, conduct trend analysis, create graphs, and obtain valuable insights.

By streamlining reporting and analysis, the right AI-powered tool serves as a time-saving asset that can guide optimization efforts and drive favorable outcomes.

This is only the start of the AI revolution transforming the social media advertising landscape. Brands can now connect and interact with their target audience in a more impactful manner and achieve their various goals.

Embracing AI experimentation can be worthwhile, as it elevates our human capabilities, increasing our efficiency, productivity, and effectiveness in our work.

If you haven’t already, add AI to your advertising stack to elevate your growth goals for 2024.

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AI & Personalization In Marketing

Alex Macura, Founder/CEO, Your Digital Assembly

The world is a fast-paced place, and the marketing industry is even more so. It has to be, just to keep up.

Over the past 50 years, we’ve seen growth in digital marketing, social media and mobile marketing, television, and database marketing.

But what does the future and, more specifically, 2024 hold for the industry as a whole? Let’s take a look.

A Surge In AI Marketing

AI gives marketers the ability to analyze huge amounts of data in seconds, boosting efficiency and productivity.

Predictive analytics can help to predict consumer and purchase behavior, allowing for more tailored, targeted ad campaigns.

And it can learn over time, too, constantly evolving into a more competent version of itself. So, if you’ve resisted getting on board the AI train, it’s time to step up to the platform.

More Personalized Content

Another area AI excels in? Personalization – which is why, in 2024, hyper-personalization is set to become our new reality.

Customers want to feel seen, so any brand that takes the time to curate a buying experience specifically for them will gain traction.

Thanks to AI and advanced analytics, content can become more tailored than ever, strengthening brand relationships and boosting return on investment (ROI).

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Finding The Balance Of Generative AI In Ads

Amy Hebdon, Founder + Managing Director, Paid Search Magic

There are many ways to use generative AI to enhance your campaigns – and only two ways to get it wrong:

• Blindly rely on it for everything.
• Refuse to use it for anything.

Generative AI is in its infancy and capable of making mistakes, so fully relying on it for 100% accuracy is a bad idea.

At the same time, avoiding it because it can’t completely replace you needlessly limits your ability to be more creative and productive.

Between those extremes are countless opportunities to improve and streamline your work. Use generative AI for discovery, challenging assumptions, brainstorming, iterating and refining ideas, editing, and strategy.

You don’t need costly subscriptions to get started, either. The free version of ChatGPT is a great entry point to meaningfully improve your work and workflow.

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Standing Out In A Playing Field Leveled By AI

Andrea Atzori, Director, Ambire

Automation serves as a formidable ally in streamlining the mundane aspects of our operations, such as campaign build and reporting.

By harnessing automation, we not only expedite these processes significantly but also diminish the likelihood of human errors creeping in.

Nevertheless, it remains undeniable that the very innovations ushered in by AI and machine learning (ML), if not managed, also bear the capacity to homogenize content, often yielding results that hover around the realm of mediocrity or average at best.

Consequently, if we do not settle for average but instead strive for marketing excellence, this pursuit involves leveraging the full spectrum of available data and tools to our advantage.

Only by adopting this approach can we mitigate rising costs and consistently deliver outstanding outcomes.

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Scale Isn’t Everything, Don’t Forget The Power Of Humans & Creativity

Ben Wood, Director of Growth & Innovation, Hallam

One trend we’ve been referencing for years is the growing impact of machine learning and automation on advertisers.

In 2023, we’ve seen a huge acceleration in technological innovation.

We’ve experienced the democratization of creative production via generative AI tools built into Google Ads and other networks, reducing cost and increasing the speed of production.

This has lowered the barrier to entry to platforms such as YouTube, and display formats for smaller advertisers with less budget to spend on assets.

We’ve also seen much-publicized advances in large language models (LLMs), enabling the development of scripts with limited programming capabilities, and offering huge economies of scale for campaign creation and PPC account expansion.

What we’ll start to see in 2024 are the second-order effects of generative AI. These are the less obvious ripple effects caused by AI over the longer term.

Despite the increase in our capabilities to create ads at scale using generative AI, this might not enhance performance but could hamper it:

• AI is already adept at creating ads at scale, such as automatically created ads and demand generation features in Performance Max.
• It’s easier than ever for advertisers to get started and enable more features due to automated creative capabilities. The lower barrier to entry could mean users see even more ads than they’re used to.
• Relying on automated creative may result in generic, feature-based ads.
• Buyers will learn to tune out these ads.

Increased Value On Human Perspectives And Creators

As consumers learn to tune out to the homogenous advertising enabled by generative AI, we’ll see an increased desire for human perspectives and creativity.

We’ve already seen Google start to surface creators and influencers via their “perspectives” feature with the introduction of Search Generative Experience, and I expect this to bleed through into the advertising landscape.

Partnering with consumer-facing creators and influencers as part of your paid media strategy will increase in importance in the year ahead to maximize your reach across Google’s evolving search landscape and beyond.

Back To Basics: Creative-First Advertising

Today, we have so many channels to manage that it’s easy for things to become disconnected. What holds it together? A creative idea.

If your campaigns lack a coherent, consistent creative concept, your campaigns will not perform.

Sometimes, we get so caught up in the platform choices we forget about the message we’re trying to get out through them.

With the advent of generative AI, I think creativity will be a key differentiating factor for successful campaigns. Starting with a strategy, then a creative concept should always come before media planning.

This serves as a golden thread – a compelling creative idea that ties all your marketing and advertising activities together and helps you stand out from the crowd.

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AI-Powered Campaigns Deliver A Future Where Marketers Can Spend Less Time On Optimization

Corey Morris, President/CEO, Voltage

AI-generated content is not going away anytime soon and is inevitably making its way into AI-powered ad campaigns in 2024.

AI can craft descriptions, headlines, and ad copy tailored to your client’s campaign objectives, resulting in effective, personalized content.

This personalization is possible because AI can understand user behavior patterns and apply experimentation and winning results to campaigns in real time.

You can monitor and manage your client’s campaign performance in real-time, ensuring that your campaigns perform relative to your goals.

Performance Max Campaigns

Performance Max campaigns will now utilize machine learning and artificial intelligence technology more thoroughly in 2024.

Performance Max campaigns, following search campaigns, are subjectively one of the most effective ways to reach a broader audience and achieve a higher return on investment.

Google now offers the option to upgrade various campaigns, including dynamic search ads and display campaigns to Performance Max campaigns.

Some current benefits of transitioning to Performance Max campaigns include:

1. Increasing creative assets.

The benefit of Performance Max campaigns utilizing your creative assets allows search engines to properly convert your search ad to best fit the intended user base on their search queries.

Creative assets will now have more flexibility when changing any text in your ad copy.

2. Implementing inventory-based ads.

When your product data feed is connected to a Performance Max campaign, your ads will now function based on the inventory you have left in stock.

This can be a huge time-saving benefit because you won’t have to manually examine your product inventory amount.

The upgrades to Performance Max campaigns will ultimately lead to a higher usage rate with advertisers.

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Automate Campaigns, Not Strategies: What Are You Doing & Why?

Tim Jensen, Sr. Search Marketing Specialist, M&T Bank

As PPC managers move forward in a world of increasingly automated, “done for you” campaigns, fully understanding the concerns and goals of your client/boss will help set you ahead.

This is not an excuse for not staying up-to-date with current ad platform functionality, but it’s too easy to drift into a “plug-and-play” mentality with the direction in which the PPC world is headed.

Setting up a conversion pixel is relatively easy these days (in many cases), but ask yourself why you are tracking that conversion, and how it ties into the business goals the company ultimately cares about.

Churning out 15 responsive search ad headlines is easier with AI, but will those stand out in the search engine results page (SERP) against creatively brainstormed headlines that speak to the heart of the customer’s needs?

Generating a list of keywords can be as simple as plugging a URL or a couple of seed phrases into Keyword Planner, but are those the most relevant terms that ideal customers are searching for?

On the positive side, increased automation in platforms has reduced the need for constant hands-on tweaking, such as in bid management. This frees up more time you can spend keeping the lines of communication open with the stakeholders you answer to.

Take some time in 2024 to think through how you can better understand stakeholder goals, and how to tie in your targeting, creative, and bidding approach to best meet those objectives.

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Expect Less Campaign Control – Find Exciting New Ways To Spend Your Time

Lauren Weisel, Director of SEM, Media.Monks

One major theme of 2023 has been automation, and I expect this to continue well into 2024.

Google continues to roll out campaign types that are heavily automated and give less control to marketers, starting with Performance Max and, most recently, with the launch of Demand Gen.

As Performance Max has evolved over the years, we see many cases where this automated campaign type works incredibly well.

With the recent rollout of Demand Gen campaigns, I suspect Google will continue to move toward either expanding these campaigns’ coverage, or rolling out more automated campaign types.

As Google continues to emphasize these automated campaign types, I expect the percentage of account spends on these campaign types to increase, as well. And beyond this, who knows!

There could be a world where traditional search campaigns as we know them sunset completely, but that’s merely a hypothesis.

Speaking of traditional search campaigns, I’m also seeing a reduction in control with the emphasis on broad match with auto-bidding this year.

While many clients were skeptical of this new match type, it’s working quite well for many advertisers.

While still available, I’m also seeing less account spend go towards phrase match keywords, and many times without any performance losses for client accounts.

From an account structure standpoint, this rollout has, in a way, been a catalyst for campaign consolidation – a far cry from the SKAG structure I was taught early on in my career.

This reduction in control that advertisers are experiencing within Google will shift how search marketers work.

However, as I reflect on my career as a search marketer, I can point to other industry shifts that seemed huge at the time, but truly freed up time to expand my skillsets.

I remember when auto-bidding strategies first came on the scene. What would I do with all my time freed up from daily bid adjustments? As automation evolved, marketers shifted how we spent our days (and thankfully, there was plenty of other work to be done).

As control becomes limited in the evolution of Google Ads, search marketers will need to become more creative with strategies to ensure that we continue to move search programs forward with the levers we can pull.

While automated, these campaigns shouldn’t be approached with a “set it and forget it” mindset.

It is a privilege to be able to educate clients and guide them in this ever-changing search landscape. There are so many testing and learning opportunities on the near horizon.

The search landscape has certainly changed a lot, especially over the past year.

While all this automation may seem scary, we must embrace automation to stay ahead of the curve. I suspect we’ll see the trajectory of automation continue to accelerate during the next year.

Not only is this a hot topic in the search space, but in our culture as a whole. I look forward to all of the automation developments 2024 has in store for search marketers.

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Searcher Intent & Audiences Are A Complex Human Formula

Lisa Raehsler, Founder And SEM Strategy Consultant, Big Click Co.

While AI and automation are always hot topics – and the technology advancements amazingly helpful – in 2024, connecting with the customer will be key.

Many advertisers will get away from this by buying into the fast and easy option: Allowing machines to do the work for their digital advertising.

That’s great for tedious task-oriented optimizations – but human strategy, experience, and even intuition will be critical for success in reaching and converting the right customer.

The pros are already in the know. Searcher intent and audiences are a complex human formula advertisers should focus on.

Societal culture, economic conditions, and political concerns change rapidly. Messaging targeting people who experience evolving needs and pain points should take center focus.

More resources: 

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Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

PPC Experts Weigh In On CPC Inflation via @sejournal, @BennyJamminS

This is an excerpt from SEJ’s PPC Trends 2024 ebook, our annual roundup of expert opinions on what you can expect over the course of the next 12 months. 

Inflation is hitting everywhere, even your ad auctions.

This year, the contributors offer guidance on navigating these increasing costs. Some note that directly seeking lower cost-per-click (CPC) prices may not be the answer.

The advice includes:

• Validate and own your campaign performance data to ensure that you have an accurate picture of expense and revenue.
• Focus on business outcomes instead of individual key performance indicators (KPIs) like CPC.
• Improve the quality of the campaigns and the value of conversions.
• Diversify your campaigns to target different intents, buyer stages, and platforms.

The common thread that runs through the quotes is that you will be more successful extracting as much value as you can out of CPCs as they are, than you will be chasing cheaper options. A cost doesn’t mean much until weighed against its benefit.

In the coming year, you’ll likely need to be very good at cost and benefit analysis.

If I had to summarize this article’s insights in three sentences, they would be:

• Cost-cutting, for its own sake, isn’t always the way.
• Don’t obsess over what you can’t control; make the higher cost worth it.
• Don’t mindlessly follow the metrics fed to you. Validate your data.

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Improve The Value Of A Click Instead Of Trying To Reduce The Cost

Amy Hebdon, Founder + Managing Director, Paid Search Magic

First, understand that cost per click (CPC) is not a strong key performance indicator (KPI).

The worst response to rising click costs is to attempt to lower average CPCs by adding lower-cost (and lower-quality) clicks.

Instead, work to get even more value from premium clicks by increasing the likelihood of conversion. Focus on landing page user experience (UX), clarify your offer to make it more desirable, and qualify your audience so that each click will likely result in a new customer.

By measuring and increasing profit per click, the impact of rising click costs diminishes.

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You Can’t Control CPC, So Focus On What You Can

Andrea Atzori, Director, Ambire

Given the increasing concerns about what seem to be well-established trends of rising cost per clicks (CPCs) – along with recent disclosures of orchestrated auctions and CPC hikes within certain advertising platforms – it comes as no surprise that the issue of CPC inflation has emerged as a matter of paramount concern for the vast majority of marketers and businesses.

Many who rely on paid media campaigns as a cornerstone of their strategies – whether aiming to draw traffic, facilitate customer acquisition, or both – have seen the impact of CPC inflation firsthand.

There is no doubt that, especially for small and medium enterprises, these are tough times. We have all heard stories of business owners concerned about how difficult it is just to make do.

So, should those entering the market now or not having the means to challenge bigger budgets just give up altogether and look for other options?

In my opinion, absolutely not. Although difficult, things can still be done to alleviate high advertising costs and direct campaigns toward higher profitability.

To start, we can focus on improving the overall campaign’s and ad’s quality; this is a given – a fundamental aspect that cannot be overlooked.

But we can also look at improving other metrics for which we have more direct control, like conversion rates and average transaction values.

Basic things and common sense will go a long way here.

Furthermore, we must shift our attention from marketing indicators to actual business objectives and measurements.

This means moving away from outdated attribution models like last click, and focusing more on business-focused outcomes like customer lifetime value (CLV) and profit margin.

In our endeavors to efficiently handle the challenge of increasing CPC across well-known advertising platforms like Google Ads and Facebook, it is vital to investigate alternative and less competitive avenues.

Platforms focused on more niche topics and phrases, such as Quora and Reddit, can offer opportunities to alleviate the financial burden linked to costly CPCs and highly competitive search terms.

Consequently, as we plan for 2024, we must emphasize experimentation and testing on less saturated platforms.

By diversifying our advertising channels and contemplating these alternatives, we can optimize our advertising budget, extend our reach to a wider audience, and reduce the impact of escalating CPCs.

Ultimately, CPCs are just a number – a number that is relative to its context and that, as such, can only be measured within that context.

So, while our ability to control inflating CPCs might be generally low, focusing on what we can do to influence the context might help us to strive for and deliver above-average results and, as such, worry less about CPCs.

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Make Your Marketing Cost-Effective By Targeting Different Funnel Stages & Platforms

Corey Morris, President/CEO, Voltage

Handling CPC Inflation

As historical data suggests – and trends continue to rise – the cost per click (CPC) for Google Ads is expected to increase across various industries in 2024. This comes in a year when the economy has already faced its share of challenges.

Between 2022 and 2023, the average CPC increased by approximately 5% and cost per lead (CPL) by about 20%, signifying a significant jump from previously documented years. Reflecting on past CPC inflation rates, the projected CPC for 2024 is expected to continue upward.

One major cause of rising CPC rates is competition. An increasing number of businesses are establishing their online presence. Securing that top spot in search results becomes increasingly challenging, unfortunately driving up the CPC.

To combat the rising costs, the most important thing to do is to be aware. Acknowledge the rising costs and formulate a strategy that benefits your clients without straining their finances or reducing ad spend.

How do you address the rising costs for yourself or your clients?

Consider diversifying your approach by launching ad campaigns targeting different stages of the funnel. Applying this strategy helps optimize your marketing cost, which allows for implementing other cost-effective marketing tactics like email marketing, social media, and SEO, which complement your paid search campaigns.

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Own Your Sources Of Truth & Understand The Value Of A Lead

Navah Hopkins, Evangelist, Optmyzr

The big theme of 2024 is owning your sources of truth and acknowledging that you will need to test many “proven” strategies and mechanics. While every year can lay claim to “getting comfortable with not being comfortable,” I expect 2024 to be particularly full of tests and questions.

A few contributing factors to this are:

1. Due to the recent evidence of inflating cost per click (CPC) and influencing the order of ad auction winners, there is some hesitancy around (Google) ad platform tech and its reporting. While there are valid reasons why auction winners or ad prices have been adjusted, the larger issue with many advertisers lies within a need for more transparency, coupled with depreciated features (like feed-only PMax and limited data in search term reports).

This may lead to mounting skepticism among PPC practitioners if that transparency isn’t communicated. I’m hopeful Google will be able to regain its well-established trust with advertisers, but it’s important to acknowledge the impact on 2024 PPC trends.

2. 2024 will be the first full year with no more Universal Analytics, and I expect some brands will still be sorting their data going into 2024. Combined with the increasing tracking restrictions from iOS updates and regulatory pressure, I’m expecting many brands to have to invest in new benchmarks.

3. Ad types have shifted, so you may need to reevaluate budgets assigned to different types. For example, Demand Gen ads replaced Discovery and truly do appear to be an improvement, while Performance Max lost its “feed-only” campaign type. While some of these changes are benign, others will require testing. Existing budgets may not account for that.

My strongest advice for 2024 is to make sure you understand the value of your leads so you can opt into value-based bidding and conversions. While many things are changing, that appears to be the one constant: The more accurate conversion data you can feed into the system, the easier time the algorithm will have making your budget work.

If you’re unsure what your conversion values should be, start by looking closely at your conversion rate by channel, and multiplying that by the average value of your customers.

If you truly can’t commit to an average, go with the lowest customer value, and then you can always correct with enhanced conversions.

As you’re testing, be sure you’re making notes and excluding data as needed. And don’t be afraid of the wild and crazy tests.

More resources: 

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Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

Performance Max Vs. Search: A Non-Scientific Look On If It Competes And What It Means via @sejournal, @jonkagan

In nearly 19 years in search marketing, I’ve seen search marketers get cranky about a lot of things.

For a long time, the biggest pushback on something Google rolled out was the good old Enhanced Campaigns fiasco of 2013, when it essentially took away the ability to bid by device. (Google walked this back two to three years later at Google Marketing Live and acted like it was doing us a favor.)

That was the biggest pain in the butt…until Performance Max came along.

For those of you in the search marketing space who are as blind to reality as a NY Jets fan, Performance Max (aka PMax) is a new-ish ad unit rolled out by Google – and in beta testing with Bing, which I still refuse to call Microsoft Advertising.

You give the engine your money and a goal (say ecommerce orders or store visits), and it will cherry-pick all the platform’s ad units (Search, Shopping, Display, Video, Email, Maps) to work together toward a single KPI.

This sounds awesome until you want to get transparency on what placement is doing what, or the even more dreaded question: “What am I triggering for in search?”

Now, Google does claim that PMax doesn’t cannibalize ad placements – which means if you run Search, Shopping, or another ad unit in parallel with PMax, they won’t compete.

To be honest, I’m not sure I trust that claim. But I needed a test scenario to try and prove this out one way or the other.

Then, a client abruptly decided they wanted to cease PMax for a hot second, and boom – I had my test scenario.

Important Note: I am not a data scientist, and in no way is this a scientifically done analysis. These are purely surface-level insights.

Scenario

Prior to the brand wanting to pause PMax, we had consistently run brand search (Phrase and Exact match only) and PMax side by side.

Performance was often mixed; sometimes profitable, sometimes not. The results were typical for non-peak shopping season for their vertical.

Bid strategies were always constant for them: PMax on target return on ad spend (TROAS), one search campaign on TROAS, and one on max conversion value.

These campaigns consistently chugged along – although prior to the brand making the call, there was a billing issue with the brand’s credit card, so the account went down for three days (a short period of time that shouldn’t impact the algorithms).

PMax would get pulled offline for eight days, but for the sake of sanity purposes, we analyzed seven days of it offline vs. seven days before it went offline and seven days after it came back online.

(Like I originally said, I’m not a data scientist, just a search marketer with a passion for bad reality TV and the NY Jets.)

Pre-PMax Offline Period

Looking at this seven-day period, we had come off of Labor Day weekend but were far enough away from it that traffic patterns came off as normal.

The three campaigns (two brand search and one PMax) had 185K impressions, with PMax driving 95% of them.

There had been 3.2K clicks (not doing “Interactions” for this, for the sake of continuity), with search driving 72% of them.

Spend was a little under $4,900, and the aggregate cost per click (CPC) was $1.24. The kicker is that the long tail brand search keywords had the highest CPC of them all (Google really said to hell with my QS on those).

We had 99 conversions, with 1/3 coming from PMax (not far off from the click and spend contribution percentages as well).

We ignore the impressions because PMax is going to blast all Google properties for impressions (for example, 3% of PMax impressions in this scenario came from TV screens).

But the conversion rate (CVR), clickthrough rate (CTR), and CPC will be the focus to decipher whether cannibalization/competition or not.

PMax Offline Period

During the seven days (out of eight) that PMax was offline and brand search was left to fend for itself, we observed some interesting data.

However, it should be noted the search bid strategy was not changed, but the funds used for PMax were reallocated back to search.

The shift in setup had an impact, but not quite in the way you’d expect. Search impressions rose 67%, but the aggregate impressions dropped 92%, as PMax wasn’t dumping the impressions anywhere.

In addition, search clicks rose 92%, but aggregate rose just 39% (remember this 39% growth, because here is where it gets a bit mind-boggling).

Spend, unencumbered by PMax stepping, for search rose a staggering 308%, but the aggregate was just up 119%.

Yes, a massive jump in spend from the reallocation (from PMax to branded search), allowing search to reach its full spend potential (within budget constraints), but just a 39% jump in clicks.

So why did this spend skyrocket? Well, the search CPCs grew 60%+ when PMax exited, driving the aggregate CPC up 51%.

On top of it, branded search impression share rose by 26%, impression share lost to budget dropped by 61%, and lastly impression share lost to rank dropped 24%.

Relaunch Of PMax

We reactivated PMax on the morning of the 9th day from when it was paused. Its budget, which had been reallocated back to search, was sent back, but no other changes were made.

We then evaluated the performance on week two of its relaunch (because PMax needs a week to relearn, so we tossed that out) and compared it to the PMax offline period.

Not surprisingly, in branded search, we saw an 11% drop in brand search impressions, a 23% drop in clicks, and a 24% drop in spend, but search CPC remained flat.

It should also be noted we saw a drop in impression share of 9%.

However, courtesy of PMax returning, aggregate impressions rose 35%, clicks 29%, and CPC dropped 7%. In addition, we saw a 91% increase in conversions.

What Does This Mean?

So, with spend wavering, despite even reallocation of the aggregate budget back into brand search and then back into PMax, the data gets fuzzy. But we note the following:

• Brand search CPC is at its highest cost when it is solo (vs that of brand search and PMax).
• Brand search CTR is higher when PMax is offline.
• Brand search CVR is lower when PMax is on.
• There is an exchange of click volume between PMax and brand search when PMax is on vs. off.

PMax has a clear and definitive impact on brand search when it is on vs. when it is off.

The Takeaway

How Google defines “does not compete with paid search” (brand specifically here) when they are run together is a bit suspect. As the loss/gain volume of clicks is a dead giveaway, there is an immediate impact.

But at the same time, running them dually shows an aggregate net impact, positively for CVR and CPC.

Providing the positive impact of CPC is for brand search, and PMax’s CPC is equal to or lower than the share of clicks it takes from brand search, then who cares?

I will wholeheartedly admit that I have had a bias against Performance Max since its inception (and I still do).

I also expected to walk away from this analysis and say that PMax is evil and destroying the value of brand paid search when they run together. But I may be wrong.

When we look at them in tandem, we see a lower aggregate CPC, and search has only a slight dip in CVR, but total conversions increase.

This means we see a holistic bonus/positive directional growth when they run side by side.

My (personal) stance is: Yes, PMax is cannibalizing/competing with paid search, but if it continues to produce holistically better search performance, then I am down for that.

I encourage others to test things out and even do the brand exclusion test on PMax, as that is likely a cleaner way of doing this type of analysis.

Needless to say, the outcome of this analysis was as humbling and surprising as when I elected to remove clogged ice from my snowblower (when I thought it was off) in 2020.

I learned a valuable lesson the hard way.

More resources: 

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Featured Image: eamesBot/Shutterstock