2018 witnessed the long-awaited arrival of LinkedIn Ads, the rebranding of AdWords into Google Ads (as well as the introduction of a ton of new features for Google Ads), further optimization of Bing Ads, and Amazon’s PPC capabilities becoming a legitimate threat to the sheer dominance of Google; it’s been an eventful year for digital marketing in more ways than one. Now is the time to look towards the future and begin strategizing how to guarantee success in a field that’s changing by the minute. Below are just a few tips and tricks to help maximize the ROI on any PPC campaign in 2019.

While sites like Amazon and Bing are undoubtedly beginning to take a small bite out of the colossal market share that Google has in PPC, Google is still top dog. Google has made a concentrated effort to continuously optimize their PPC platform and their new updates for 2019 are already blowing people out of the water. 2019 will witness the introduction of Google Marketing, a one-stop-shop for advertisers to plan, spend, and measure their PPC and other digital marketing campaigns. Google will also unveil its implementation of Responsive Search Ads to allow advertisers to display the most effective headlines and taglines when users search for relevant terms. With the release of all this, along with other neat features like the offering of lead ads on YouTube and greater cross-device analytics, the question is quickly becoming ‘What can’t Google Ads do?!”

While platforms like Google and Facebook, and their respective tools, will be essential members of any PPC arsenal, they shouldn’t be the only two. 2019 will see the continued rise of new platforms in paid search advertising, including LinkedIn, Pinterest, and SnapChat. While these companies are late adopters to the PPC space, so too was Facebook, and it managed to achieve astronomical success. Pinterest, while not conventionally thought of as a search engine or a social network, is actually a unique mixture of both. In fact, over two billion searches take place on Pinterest every month, with 97% of those being unbranded. Furthermore, Pinterest will also allow users to buy products directly from product pins that have their inventory availability and price listed. In a recent blog we discussed the Business-to-Business (B2B) advantages of LinkedIn’s PPC platform. For marketers looking to recruit new hires or connect to potential vendors, LinkedIn is the ideal choice. Meanwhile, SnapChat continues to gain relevance in the PPC space. This exclusively visual platform can seamlessly advertise promotions while guiding prospective customers from first impressions to landing pages for potential sales, all with a single click.

There’s no denying the importance of making your business website mobile ready, but the point especially needs to be heeded with regards to PPC. Google now drives 95% of all of its paid search advertising on mobile devices, only barely trumping Facebook, who yields 87% of all of its ad revenue from mobile traffic. While the imperativeness of mobile PPC optimization is already easily conveyed, it’s been estimated that mobile advertising will account for 72% of US ad spend by next year.

Any advertiser should make sure to enable mobile-preferred ads and to thoroughly conduct research on which keywords are best for mobile and desktop ads, respectively. Furthermore, Google also recommends tailoring mobile ads to fit “micro-moments”, which focus on delivering immediate results to satisfy specific queries at the moment of search. This means that a mobile ad for the search term “restaurants in Raleigh” should be curated differently than a desktop ad for the same term. This is because the mobile search is more likely to be conducted with the intent of acting on the given information immediately. Both Bing and Google are also trying to ease the burden of creating digestible listings by reconfiguring their mobile layouts to display in-store availability and pricing for its local catalog ads.

PPC and its benefits have been extensively discussed all over the web, including on our own blog. PPC and its guaranteed low-risk, high-reward methods have rightfully catapulted it to the forefront of many digital marketing campaigns. Just as marketers must adopt the current methodologies for SEO, email marketing, and even blogging, they must also learn to reconfigure and optimize their best practices for PPC.

It can be challenging to know which PPC practices and tools are best for your business goals. Click here to set up a free consultation with Seven Ages Design and start maximizing your advertising ROI with the right PPC campaign.