5 PPC Strategies and Tools to Test in 2023

If you do a search for “2019…PPC…Trends” (or something similar) and open the top results, you’d think they all plagiarized each other. A lot of articles are claiming “Keyword search is dead!” or “This is the beginning of the end for keywords” and suggesting you invest heavily in audience-focused bidding. I can’t help but think, “Sure, you all abandon keyword targeting and I’ll get all the results to myself.” As the Japanese might say, “Sayonara!” (pronounced “Si-yo-nara” … you know, that word that means “goodbye!”)

Even if you’re running an old-school pay per click marketing strategy, if it’s making you money, keep doing it! However, there are many new things worth testing. We always advise our clients that they allocate a small portion of their budget for testing new features. The next best thing is to set aside some of the money they make directly from pay per click advertising and spend it on experimental advertising.
With that said, here are some promising PPC strategies and tools we recommend you test in 2019.

Smart Shopping Campaigns

Smart shopping campaigns are particularly invaluable for online stores with large product lines. For one thing, smart shopping campaigns can make managing your paid display and product ads a breeze. And for another, it leverages Googles highly touted automated bidding which works well for well-structured accounts (which is what’s required for smart shopping campaigns.

According to Google,
Our systems will pull from your product feed and test different combinations of the image and text you provide, then show the most relevant ads across Google networks, including the Google Search Network, the Google Display Network, YouTube, and Gmail.
To help you get the best value from each ad, Google also automates ad placement and bidding for maximum conversion value at your given budget. – https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7674739?hl=en

This all sounds promising, but before you grab that Magic Lamp, Aladdin, your Google Ads and Merchant accounts need to be in ttip-topshape. This means conversion tracking with transaction-specific values, adding a global tag to your site, and having a remarketing list of at least 100 visitors. It’s also a good idea to make sure that your products have very segmented Product Categories assigned and loaded into the feed. These are what help you segment your feed in Google Ads.

There are many other caveats, but one important catch that applies to not only this but all other strategies, is that you need time for the machine learning to optimize! That’s right, you need to let it marinade for a little while. The results will be disappointing at first but let Google do its “thang” and you’ll realize an ROI on the time it spent optimizing and then some.

Amazon Advertising

It’s pretty surprising to me that Amazon Advertising only started picking up in 2015 and is only now starting to get noticed as a viable option for advertising. Of course, if you don’t sell products, Amazon isn’t much to look at. But for all you ecommerce store owners out there, Amazon should be at the top of your list.You see, Google started as a search-focused company that added shopping to its list of super powers.

Amazon started as a company selling products online. If it knows anything, it’s how to sell a product – your product! They offer a variety of ways to help you advertise, but arguably the most familiar way is to go through their sponsored products. This is where you decide with products you want to sell, define which keywords you want to bid on, and create an ad to appear in the search results. For Google Ads users, that sounds pretty familiar.

Another way to integrate Amazon into your PPC strategy is to leverage their affiliate program. Let’s say you sell soap and only soap. In fact, you only sell one size and scent of soap. You might have a pretty dinky store. The place feels empty! You can beef up your product offering by using Amazon’s Affiliate program. Affiliate programs are a great way to sell products on behalf of others by showcasing them next to yours. In the soap example, you may want to advertise shampoo along with it! Or maybe soap holders.

Video Advertising

Streaming has been replacing various forms of entertainment for a long time now. There are several video categories including tutorials, gameplay, unboxings, podcasts (converted to video like Joe Rogan), educational, and other original content. While the competition for ad space on these programs can be fierce, several big players are removing their ads from YouTube making for less competition. The variety of content also increases the opportunities for relevant video advertising. For instance, the YouTube channel Steve1989MREInfo spends about a half hour per video eating his way through various MREs and providing his review of the food and taste. That’s a pretty narrow niche.

There are several types of viewers on his channel that one could advertise to including military enthusiasts, emergency preparedness fans, and more. Updating Your Google Ads to Fit the New Responsive Ads You might be turned off to the idea of changing your ads over to the new responsive ad format. You may have hundreds or thousands of ad copy at the moment. Start by updating your most prolific, top producing campaigns or ad groups and work your way down.
With responsive text ads, you HAVE to think and do things differently than before. For instance, your headlines need to be very distinct from each other. Google says,

“To increase the likelihood that your ad shows, be sure to provide at least 5 distinct headlines that don’t repeat the same or similar phrases. Providing redundant headlines will restrict the system’s ability to generate combinations.“ – https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7684791?hl=en

Their example found here, highlights how different your ad setup will look. You are required to trust Google with the task of assembling the most compelling ad. Again, this requires patience and time. This leads me into my last PPC strategy and tool to test for 2019. Automation!

Scripts and Automation

Third-party tools used to be the king of automation in the Google Ads space. Google provided their own but they are difficult to learn, harder to implement, and impossible to hold accountable. These days, Google has started releasing impressive functionality directly into the Google Ads interface. Certainly, responsive text ads fall into this category. Other things to try include goal-optimized shopping campaigns, automated bidding, and dynamic display ads.

To ensure the success of these tools, make sure you’ve set up proper conversion tracking. It needs to be squeaky clean and effective. You also want to monitor them like they are a baby in Home Depot. Left unattended, they can quickly siphon your budget or fail to produce results. This can skew your analysis. If things go south, you want to be able to quickly reset the account to before you used the automation feature.