PAID SEARCH | PPC | 6 PPC Trends You Need To Know For 2022 Success

Article by Lisa Raehsler

Learn about the paid search innovations, new platform features, and evolving privacy issues driving major changes in PPC strategy for 2022.

2022 looks promising for search marketers, particularly on the heels of great technical enhancements, new releases, and feature enhancements we’ve seen in the search marketing world and other paid ad platforms this year.

Whether you are looking for optimizations to refresh your existing strategy or on the hunt for entirely new ways to reach your audience, these trends are fantastic areas to explore as you seek to boost your PPC returns in the year ahead.

1. Conversion Actions

Measuring current goals and core initiatives is a baseline for your PPC strategy. As the tracking in the ad platforms and analytics platforms gets more sophisticated, so do the number and type of actions that advertisers can track.

Typically, advertisers are tracking several conversion actions per account.

For example, common PPC conversion goals include:

Transactions.
Online contact forms.
Request demo or estimate.
Phone calls: first time/repeat.
Chat conversions.
Local actions: directions.
Offline conversions: matched with an ad click.
Custom goals.

Are you measuring everything you could be measuring?

What is the value your company associates with each conversion goal?

2. Man Your Automations

While the ad platforms continue to roll out automation options to simplify ad management, it is not as easy as flipping a switch. Human PPC managers need to guide and monitor automation to make the most of it.

For example, campaigns using smart bidding strategies need to be monitored and tweaked from time to time to adjust Target CPA or Target ROAS.

Smart Creatives such as responsive search ads and responsive display ads should be reviewed for performance on individual assets, which we will cover later in this post.

As part of your PPC strategy, determine which components of your account can be automated from bidding to creative to possibly using scripts. Then evaluate and monitor the results.

You may want to compare previous “manual” campaigns on various data points.

3. Keyword Matching Strategies

There have been big changes in the keyword match type technical functioning from the Google Ads and Microsoft Ads this year, and these require a slight change in strategy.