Last Updated on 2021-01-22 by ppcguybklyn
After a long 2020, the new year has finally arrived. In 2021, what kind of digital marketing and PPC advertising trends can we expect? In this article, I will sort out the major updates of Google in the past, and use these updates to speculate on what I think may be the industry trend in the next year or two.
Major updates to Google in the past few years
We can speculate on the future digital marketing trends based on the major updates of Google in the past few years. The following are the most important updates for digital marketing and PPC advertising in my opinion recently:
Automated tools make advertising operations easier
This is one of the biggest changes in Google Ads in recent years. Google Ads has not been an approachable platform before. The main reason is that it requires a lot of mathematical calculations to know the most suitable bid for the advertising account. The process of how to set up advertisements on Google Ads is quite tedious for pure novices. Especially for shopping ads, if you don’t have a basic understanding of Google Merchant Center and product feeds, it can be a big project to complete the shopping ads setting alone.
However, in recent years, with the introduction of automatic bidding strategies and smart campaigns by Google Ads, these things that originally had barriers to entry have gradually become much easier. If you are a small business owner who can’t hire someone to do it for you, you can also create your own Google ads in a very short time through these automated tools and smart ads. For experienced agency advertisers, the emergence of these tools has also made our work a lot easier. We can spend more time and energy on how to improve web content and the experience of using the website to increase the overall conversion rate.
Updates to the close variants and search terms report
Another important update of Google Ads is the change in close variants and the update of search terms reports that will hide content that has less search volume.
The update of close variants allows the exact match keywords to be matched to search terms with similar meanings, which allows the match type to reach a wider audience. But at the same time makes the exact match less targeted. Close variants make it necessary for users of search ads to adjust their strategies. Since the exact matches still bring other similar search terms, this must be taken into consideration when selecting keywords and writing ad copy.
The update of the search terms report prevents users from seeing some of the less searched terms in Google Ads, which is a headache for advertisers who want to exclude irrelevant traffic. In the future, it is expected that we will spend more advertising budget to find the most suitable keywords for the advertising account. This update means that advertisers must be more cautious in the selection and use of keywords to avoid unnecessary costs.
Search algorithm updates
In 2020, Google's search algorithm has undergone a total of three major updates, and several new updates have been added for English language and website content and search terms matching. Google will also strengthen the matching of search terms written as a paragraph with the website. In the future, if you type a long string of text in the search, Google will be able to match it to more suitable search results.You can read this article for detailed search related updates in 2020.
In addition, the website experience will become more and more important in the organic search ranking, which includes website loading speed, mobile device friendliness, and website security. Although this update of the website experience will only affect the search ranking of the mobile version, in view of the increasing search volume of mobile devices, in the future, webmasters will increasingly be unable to ignore the experience of the mobile version.
Google My Business update in response to the pandemic
In order to help small and medium-sized enterprises whose business has been greatly affected by the COVID-19 epidemic, Google has made a lot of Google My Business updates in the past year. These are all for the purpose of allowing small and medium-sized enterprises to list more detailed business information on Google, so that people can know whether to visit these stores under the situation of pandemic control. In addition to COVID-related information and business content updates, Google My Business has also added some new features that make it easier for business owners to manage and observe results.For a detailed list of updates, please refer to this article.
All in all, as Google My Business adds more and more features to help SME owners, it is more worthwhile to invest in this service. For companies targeting local customers, the more complete the information on Google, the easier it will be to attract more local potential customers. In the future, we should and can look forward to more functional updates of Google My Business that can help companies match up with local customers.
Transparency and Consent Framework 2.0 (TCF V2.0) and Consent mode
In order to protect users' data access, Google announced in 2020 that it will be integrated with TCF V2.0 in Europe. If the owners don’t want to use this framework, they can choose to use the new consent model. That is to say, as long as there is TCF V2.0 or similar regulations, these frameworks or Google's consent mode must be used.
Simply put, when a visitor enters the website, the owner must inform the visitor what kind of information the website will access and how it will be used. For advertisers who need to place accurate marketing and remarketing advertisements, it is absolutely necessary to pay attention to the relevant regulations of this update. At the same time, this update also represents the types of related advertisements that use website visitor information to place. Their use and effectiveness will face no small challenges in the future.
New Google Analytics analysis features
In 2020, Google Analytics launched many new functions. In addition to analyzing the flow of APP and web pages at the same time, it also added some CRM functions to analyze the value of website visitors, so that GA, which already has very polished functions, can have more application. In the future, Google Analytics is likely to continue to move in the direction of CRM analysis, so that business owners only need to use GA as a platform to calculate the value of visitors brought by various channels.
Use past updates to speculate on the future direction
After sorting out the past few major updates, I think the future trends of digital marketing and paid search advertising on the Google search engine may be as follows:
More automation tools
In addition to continuous updates to improve the automatic bidding strategy, Google Ads should continue to introduce more automatic tools that allow advertisers to more easily create advertising campaigns, write ad copy, and manage keyword lists in the future. I think the purpose of Google is to hope that business owners who can’t spend money on agencies can also use these automated tools and functions to operate paid search ads on their own in the future. These tools can also save a lot of time spent on time-consuming basic work for agency advertisers, and focus on marketing strategies and planning.
Web experience will become more and more important for SEO
Although the web experience has always been a significant part of the SEO ranking, after the new website experience is updated, Google is likely to continue to make the mobile web experience more important. Therefore, when managing SEO rankings, in addition to constantly using keyword research to add website content to improve rankings, it is also very important to improve website experience. Especially if the website has a very large amount of mobile traffic, then it is necessary to improve the website experience to maintain the mobile ranking of the page at a certain level, so as to ensure a stable source of traffic.
Pay more attention to user privacy and data usage
In response to the transparency and consent framework 2.0 update, I think it is definitely one of the most important changes in the past year, because it is related to how advertisers obtain user information and whether they can use this information for advertising. The use of website visitor information for accurate ad targeting has always been one of the focuses when discussing user privacy. Nowadays, major platforms including Google are paying more and more attention to this. Unless the area and users are not affected by TCF V2.0 or similar regulatory control, most websites must obtain the consent of website users before they can access their data.
In the next one or two years, we should be able to expect Google to continue to strengthen this aspect. This means that owners, whether they are managing websites or advertising, must take into account the relevant regulations on the use of data. This also means that when analyzing website traffic, Google Analytics or other analysis tools cannot cover all the habits of website users. So if the account itself is very dependent on remarketing and accurate ad targeting, it is necessary to find other alternatives.
Make it easier for SMEs to list their products and advertisements on Google
In addition to automated advertising tools, the constant updates of Google My Business will also make it easier for small and medium-sized enterprises to manage their own corporate information on Google. In 2020, a series of updates to help local small businesses in response to the pandemic will surely continue in 2021, when it has not been resolved. I think Google’s goal in this regard will be to hope that small and medium-sized business owners can list products and advertisements on Google without spending too much time and effort, and make it easier for their companies to be found by potential local customers on Google. Therefore, in terms of operating small and medium-sized enterprises in the future, investing time in updating Google My Business information and making good use of Google Shopping’s free listings should be able to gain a lot of benefits in promoting business.
