Rules of the game for PPC in 2021: what is relevant in Google ADS

At the beginning of the year, it is customary to sum up and make plans/ But 2020 has shown that all our plans and strategies should now be built in a constantly changing coordinate system. Most likely 2021 will continue this trend, and most importantly, in my opinion, we should adopt the point that there will be no more permanent conditions. Now our permanence will be changings.

And now let's get closer to the trends in contextual advertising. First, let's go over those trends that appeared before 2021 and will continue to be relevant:

1. Rising importance of analytics

Of course, you will say that this is the trend of all past years and you will be right, and most likely the importance of analytics in the success of your advertising campaigns will continue in the future.

What is important to pay attention to in 2021:

• Emergence of the new Google Analytics 4. The main difference between the new platform and its predecessor: scalable cross-platform analytics; it is based on events, not sessions; easy integration with all Google products; user identification across devices and platforms, making it easy to get data along the user journey.
• The correctness of the settings for accounting for mini and macro conversions in the Google Ads account. If earlier it was difficult to imagine successful campaigns without correctly taking into account goals, now, taking into account our fourth trend “Automation”, without clear work with conversions, the use of many Google Ads tools will become simply impossible.
• Choosing the optimal attribution model for working with Google Ads. We need to not only correctly calculate goals, but also take into account the contribution of each campaign in achieving conversion. So if you still use the “Last click” attribution model, then you most likely overestimate the value of campaigns with branded queries and pay insufficient attention to those campaigns that were at the beginning of the chain. You can read more about attribution models and their use here.

2. Mobile dominance

The steady growth in the share of mobile traffic will continue to influence the success of your advertising campaigns in 2021. Your ads, USPs, and creatives should be designed to work for a mobile audience.

According to GlobalWebIndex, over 5,19 billion people used mobile phones in 2020, the number of users grew by 124 million (2,4%) year on year.

We use mobile devices for more than half of all the time we spend online. It is about 50,1% of all internet time. 80% of all Internet users have a mobile phone, and therefore this trend should not be neglected in PPC either.

By the way, Mobile is also one of the leading SEO trends for 2021.

3. New-old voice search

No one is surprised anymore by people having conversations with their phone, voice assistants have entered our lives and become commonplace. So, in 2018, 2.5 million voice assistants were installed on mobile devices, and it is expected that in 2023 there will be 8 million voice assistants.

Voice search users will generate an increasing number of low-frequency queries, and their uniqueness will make it difficult to collect semantics for such queries. These trends only mean that setting up contextual advertising is becoming more complex, but at the same time an interesting process. And to make your campaigns more effective in 2021, this type of search should not be underestimated.

4. Automation

Google purposely changes the rules of working with Google Ads towards automation, if earlier we worked with dynamic adaptive ads and campaigns, now the arsenal has expanded significantly. Now we have automatic bidding strategies:

• the maximum number of clicks;
• target percentage of received impressions;
• target cost per conversion;
• target return on investment in advertising;
• maximum conversions;
• maximum conversion value.

In this connection, new elements have been added to the routine work of a PPC specialist:

• Attention to landing pages. The success of automatic campaigns directly correlates with the quality of the landing page, not only with its content, response completeness and attractiveness of the USP, but also with the SEO optimization of this page. The robot must understand who this page is for, what we are selling and using what queries buyers will search for it.
• Balance between manual campaign setting and automatic strategies. A direct launch of the machine often does not give the desired result, and before the automatic strategy starts working, as you need, you must provide the system with a sufficiently large block of data, and the larger and more accurate this data is, the better the result you will get at the output. Therefore, often only after working out campaigns in manual mode, you can expect the correct operation of the auto strategy.
• Interpenetration of marketing and PPC. We cannot consider context setting in isolation from usability and SEO optimization of landing pages, web analytics, product understanding and USP creation in 2021.

More about auto strategies here and here.