The digital marketing world has seen many new changes in this year so far. This year has been a great milestone in terms of Search Engine Optimization, content marketing, and the lead generation trends. So far the SEM and PPC trends in 2018 have been more reliable and data-oriented to make search marketers happier than ever. Hereby, we are looking at the trends that have either cherished or will help us with the Bing ads and AdWords campaigns.
Page Speed
Talking about mobile phone optimization is so 2016, now the number of mobile search users have already surpassed the desktop user data by a big margin. All this happened primarily because of the page loading speed. Heavy websites can make you lose more than 40 percent of the website traffic and can lead to an abrupt rise in bounce rate too. The audience is not going to be biased, and wait for your website to load. Everybody wants quick results for anything everybody searches for. The customers are said to be the most impatient beings. If you make them wait, then you have to wait to improve your conversion rate.
In 2016, The Google also provided a solution to the slow loading page with the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). The AMP has the ability to reduce the loading time to milliseconds. The marketers are already implementing the AMP pages to their campaigns to observe a quicker load time and improved conversion rate. It is highly recommended for marketers and business owners to get the most out of their campaigns with AMP.
New And Improved Adwords Interface
The blue box in the corner of the Adwords platform “Try The Faster Adwords” has been the most useful feature for the marketers in the pay per click PPC domain. This new Interface is expected to make PPC better with improved and faster results. While the new Adwords possesses the Google Sleek pattern and focuses more on productivity. But the new version lacks the custom reports feature. It may take some time to adjust to the new feature, but the new and exciting features will surely make your PPC strategy stand out. Although, you can still access the old Interface from the wrench icon in the top corner.
Google Attribution
The Google Attribution is a great way to measure your campaigns. As it helps you keep a track of every ad dollar spent in your paid search campaign. The Google Attribution testing can also be very handy in cross-check the performance of your campaign on different devices and channels. It gives you a better vision of your audience targeting. The GA is already integrated into the Interface, so you don’t have to rely on an external tool to analyze the data and the results.
Apart from the aforementioned PPC trends, there is going to be a new wave of SEM marketing trends. It is expected from these trends to change the way the SEM marketing works.
AI and Machine Learning
The Artificial Intelligence and machine learning are two of the most talked about terms in the technology world. Machine learning is going to be the next big thing in the digital marketing Industry too. The data-driven process helps the marketers and entrepreneurs to understand the market pattern and predict the upcoming trends. This will help in making the ads targeting process even more efficient.
The marketing approach driven by data can be a major assistance for the e-commerce sellers. With the frequent changes in traffic sources and Adwords, Machine learning helps in making the process steady while working on a large scale.
The Google Analytics has recently added a new feature: Analytical Intelligence. It makes the data-driven approach easy to understand. The machine learning automates the process with features like automated insights, session quality predictability, smart lists, smart goals, etc.
Google Shopping
Google shopping is expected to become a top-grossing trend in 2018 PPC. As it gives the e-commerce sellers a step ahead to showcase their product at Google home. It enables them to sell more products with smart display campaigns. The Google shopping ads allow the searcher to compare and choose from a wide range of products on the result pages itself.
Customer Engagement
Gaining the customer’s trust should be the top priority for any business owner. So staying in a right affinity with the customers can give you the gem of word of mouth marketing i.e. the best form of advertising. To stay in a good affinity with the customer, It is advised to keep constant interactions with customers. Whether it be with your content and reviews on your website or with engaging with them on the social media platforms. You must have a nice rapport with your audience, without it all the audience targeting options and efforts will go in vain. The online reputation is majorly decided by how your target audience looks at your product/service. It is up to you, how you want to showcase your business to them.
Visual and Voice Search
The Voice assistant has been around for a while now. Yet, the new and improved version of voice and visual search is going to be a big hit this year. The tendency of voice and visual search to come up with results quicker than its text counterpart. It is already getting more attention, and the marketers are going to use this fact in 2018 to use it in their favor with search ads. In the age of smartphones, people spend more time looking at the visual content as compared to the text. Whether it be an image or a video, it is certainly getting more views than the text part. The visual content connects better with the audience than the written one. The majority of the audience are likely to watch a video than reading the content.
Conclusion
There are many other trends that we have not covered here. However, in this ever-changing marketing trends, you should definitely try to keep pace with the trends. The new and upcoming PPC trends are meant to improve your PPC campaigns. These trends are going to more useful and effective. Whatever the new changes we are going to experience in the year 2018, it will surely ease our efforts and help with our PPC strategies.
