Top PPC Trends in 2024: Experts Share Their Thoughts

The updates in digital marketing trends and processes don’t necessarily wait for the calendar year to change. They keep upgrading regardless of the time of the year. 

However, it still makes sense to ask this question: Are you prepared for the upcoming PPC trends in 2024? 

Whether you’re already investing in PPC advertising or planning to, you need to ensure that you’re not burning your money on outdated PPC practices. 

To help you approach PPC ads the right way in the upcoming months and years, we’ve covered the latest PPC trends and got exclusive insights from the top digital marketers. 

So let’s dive in and understand how the PPC landscape is shaping up in 2024 and beyond so that you get the best returns on your ad spend.

What is PPC in Advertising?

Pay-per-click advertising is an online advertising model where the advertiser pays a certain fee every time their ad gets clicked on. In other words, you pay to drive the targeted traffic to your Shopify website, eCommerce site, or mobile app. 

If done right, PPC can get you valuable leads and sales for a tiny amount spent on ads. 

For example, you’re a SaaS brand and you’re advertising for a landing page that can get you sign-ups. Your product’s monthly subscription plans range between $200 to $500 and you’re paying $3 per click for your ad.

Let’s say 100 users clicked your ad and only five of them converted with an average ticket size of $300. Doing the math — you’d pay $300 for the 100 clicks and get $1500 in monthly recurring revenue. 

This was a hypothetical scenario. The actual PPC  conversion rate can vary based on your business type and how effectively you plan your PPC campaigns.

Some of the most popular PPC advertising platforms are: 

• Google Ads
• Facebook Ads
• LinkedIn Ads
• YouTube Ads
• Instagram Ads
• Twitter Advertising
• TikTok Ads, etc. 

Now, before we jump into the upcoming PPC trends and top marketers’ opinions on them, let’s quickly understand some of the key benefits of PPC advertising.

Benefits of PPC Advertising 

Search ads (or specifically Google Ads) have come a long way since its launch in 2000. Google has been continuously upgrading its advertising platform and with advanced technologies like AI and ML, it has become a self-serve ads system. 

It has certainly made digital marketers’ lives easy over the years. 

“I believe automation is the new normal in the PPC industry. While there are practical drawbacks to automation, in general, it provides a net gain in efficiency and performance.”

Kent Lewis, Chief Marketing Officer at DEKSIA

That said, here are some compelling reasons to add PPC ads to your digital marketing strategy: 

Faster results: As a startup or small business, PPC ads help you gain initial traction while you build your organic presence in search engines. While getting results from SEO would take a few months, you can start getting quick wins with PPC. 

More control: With PPC, you have control over the keywords you want to target & rank for and the ad placement. Besides, you can also A/B test different keywords and ad formats to see what works and what doesn’t.

Target potential buyers: PPC advertising allows you to bid for the keywords that solution-aware persona (potential buyers) would search for while buying the solutions. This way, you can place your landing page directly on top of the search results and convert your warm audience into paying customers.

“In a world where PPC is increasingly automated, a successful strategy in 2023 needs to focus more on two key elements: ad creative and landing page optimization. When bidding, targeting, placements, etc. are automated, your ad creative is the key advantage you have to stand out from the competition and earn those clicks.”

Jyll Saskin Gales, Google Ads Coach at Jyll.ca

“As PPC is using ever-more sophisticated AI to deliver results, advertisers must rethink what value they can add to the campaigns they manage. Marketers can shift to the roles of PPC doctor, PPC pilot, and PPC teacher, where they respectively select the best automation for the job, monitor that it works as intended, and feed it better data, like first-party business data. All this can be a lot of work, so I’m a fan of deploying automation layering.”

Frederick Vallaeys, CEO at Optmyzr

Even at the most basic level, AI can help you create compelling ad copies, predict click-through rates, and identify bids that can get maximum traffic.

1. PPC Automation 

PPC automation has been one of the top PPC trends in 2023 and will continue to be the same in 2024. PPC automation leverages AI and machine learning to automate plenty of search ads-related tasks that otherwise take considerable time and manual effort. 

These tasks can include keyword research, ad copywriting, writing headlines, bid management, and many more.

“As PPC and the overall digital marketing landscape continue to evolve and become more complex, marketers will need to be comfortable with some degree of automation in their lives. While most of us still have a healthy skepticism of Google's fully automated solutions (such as automatically written ads, smart campaigns, or auto-applied recommendations), some more mundane parts of account management can and should be automated.”

Mark Irvine, Director of Paid Media at SearchLab

Now, let’s look at some of the advanced ways to automate your PPC campaigns: 

• Setting automated bids to optimise conversions at targeted CPA
• Removing the low-performing ads and boosting the ads that are getting results
• Generating dynamic ads based on users’ behaviour 
• Auto-generated performance reports for PPC campaigns, etc. 

Although automation can help you save time and improve efficiency, it's important to ensure that campaigns are regularly monitored and optimised by human experts as well.

2. Privacy-centric Advertising 

As we bid adieu to third-party cookies in the coming months, the focus is now on how you can leverage first-party data to prepare ad campaigns. The ban on third-party cookies means that the data becomes less accurate, conversion tracking becomes more difficult, and targeting advertising becomes cohort-based via the Protected Audience API. 

In this PPC trend, PPC advertisers have to gear up for adopting new methods of data collection to stop relying on third-party data for user behaviour on websites. 

Improving First-party data collection: Implement server-side tracking so that you can rely on first-party cookies to continue tracking user behaviour and sending this data via a destination server to your ad platforms. 

Adopt Alternative Tracking Methods: Cookie consent and ad blockers make it almost impossible for brands to track user behaviour on sites. Instead, consider alternatives such as AI-powered tracking to continue tracking and gather reliable information and data to run effective PPC campaigns.

Google’s Privacy Sandbox: Keep an eye out for technologies and tools aimed at improving user’s privacy across the web. You do not want to land in a situation where user privacy is compromised for the sake of gathering PPC campaign data. Google’s Privacy Sandbox contains a set of tools that are continually evolving to improve user privacy on the web. 

3. Evolution of Smart Bidding 

Smart bidding is a machine learning-based bidding strategy that helps you optimise ad bids in real-time based on the conversion goals you set. Google’s AI systems optimise bid strategies by analysing factors such as user behaviour, target keywords, and conversion rates. 

By leveraging the smart bidding PPC trend, you can save time and increase the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns. For instance, these are some of the use cases of smart bidding for your PPC goals: 

• Increasing your conversion rate with Maximise conversions bidding
• Optimising Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) with Target CPA bidding
• Maximising the total conversion value of your campaign with Maximise conversions value bidding
• Get optimum Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) with Target ROAS bidding

“In larger accounts, automated bidding can be a blessing on smaller campaigns to free up time for us to focus on the campaigns that spend most of our budgets and drive most of our success. Regularly reevaluate your priorities and identify what you need to manually manage, what could be automated, and revisit how automation is performing in your account.”

Duane Brown (CEO & Head of Strategy at Take Some Risk Inc.)

As AI technology continues to improve, we can expect to see even more advanced and sophisticated smart bidding strategies being developed.

4. PPC and Social Media Integration 

As mentioned earlier, businesses are investing in a variety of platforms for their PPC campaigns, including social media networks. In fact, $134 billion were spent on social media advertising i.e. 33% of the total global digital ad spend. 

Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and TikTok are the latest PPC trends that you shouldn’t ignore in 2024. 

Case in point: 

Instagram Reels has 2 billion monthly active users

YouTube Shorts has 1.5 billion monthly active users with combined video views of 30 billion.

TikTok has over 1 billion monthly active users

“I don’t think keyword advertising is going away anytime soon because it’s just an incredible way to connect with prospective buyers at the moment of relevance. But video and especially social videos like YouTube Shorts and TikTok have incredible momentum — remember Google has long said that YouTube is the second biggest search engine on the planet.”

Frederick Vallaeys, CEO at Optmyzr

Thus, you can reach a much larger and more targeted audience by leveraging these social media platforms for your PPC campaigns. This would not only get you more traffic, leads, and sales, but also improve your overall digital presence. 

5. Increase the Use of Video Ads 

Video ads are becoming increasingly popular in PPC trends, and experts predict that they will continue to grow in popularity in 2024. According to a study, more than 80% of people have been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a video. 

This brings you a great opportunity to reach your target audience through video ads on platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo.

“Video has added an incremental performance opportunity, and while it has had a minor impact on PPC strategies today, I expect the impact to be exponential in the next year or two, especially if pricing remains competitive and engagement & click-through rates are higher.”

Kent Lewis, Chief Marketing Officer at DEKSIA

So, if you haven’t taken advantage of the growing popularity of video ads yet, now is the perfect time to do so. Consider incorporating videos in your PPC strategy and advertise them on video ad platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc. 

6. Having a Remarketing Approach 

With all the analytics and data at your disposal, you need to have a remarketing approach to PPC campaigns. The PPC trend of remarketing ads involves targeting an audience you haven’t acted with the first time when they saw your ad. So you’re displaying ads again once they leave your site. You can personalise such ads specifically for that audience and even offer special benefits for them to convert. 

Research suggests that retargeting can lead to a 147% higher conversion rate than traditional advertising. Remarketing ads in PPC is not just limited to a single platform. It is a multi-platform PPC trend that isn’t dying anytime soon. You can apply remarketing campaigns across multiple platforms like social media, display ads, Google ads, video ads, etc. 

7. Use of Long-Tail and Intent-Based Keywords

Long-tail keywords and intent-based keywords are more important than ever in PPC advertising and remain one of the main trends in PPC. As voice search is on the rise, this latest PPC trend helps you target granular phrases that people use when they’re getting close to making a purchase. 

It may generate less traffic but you’re assured that the traffic that you do get is highly relevant to your ads and products. It shows that people who click on your ads are more inclined to what you’re offering and have higher chances of converting. Targeting intent-based keywords and long-tail keywords in your PPC campaigns can help with 

Better Conversion Rates: As you only get highly relevant traffic who are at the bottom of the buying funnel and are already acquainted with your brand, there are higher chances of users clicking on your ads and converting to customers. 

Lower costs: Considering that long-tail keywords have less competition, they also have lower costs attached to them. Less cost subsequently means lower cost-per-click and an optimised advertising budget. 

Understanding Your Audience Better: While doing keyword research for intent-based keywords in your PPC campaigns, you get an insight into your audience’s needs. It also helps you gauge what stage of the buying process they’re in. This research would also help you prepare your organic SEO strategy, not just PPC. 

8. SEO and PPC Integration 

Marketers’ preferences are divided when it comes to SEO and PPC. They’re often seen as separate entities, but integrating the two can lead to even better results. By aligning PPC campaigns with your SEO strategy, you can increase visibility and reach, as well as improve your overall digital marketing strategy.

“Digital marketing includes both organic search and paid ads, but these two teams often operate in silos. That’s because there are a few differentiating factors that contribute to their separation. However, if you account for these factors and create a coordinated strategy, the combined results can far outperform what SEO and PPC teams can achieve individually.”

Expert from Supple - Hardy

So it’s not about SEO vs SEM, you need both strategies to optimise the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts and achieve bottom-line goals. You can combine SEO and PPC even if you’re a local business.

Let’s say you’re a real estate firm based in Brisbane, Australia. Now, you can build your organic presence for real estate search queries for locations in and around Brisbane by working on your local SEO.  

At the same time, you can drive more traffic to your landing, service, and inquiry pages with search ads for the relevant keyword intent and convert them into leads. 

Conclusion Remarks 

The PPC landscape is growing and evolving constantly and as a marketer, you must keep up with the latest trends in PPC to exploit its full potential. 

That’s why we have not just covered the main trends in PPC but also tried to give you the perspectives of practitioners who have used these tactics and succeeded in their PPC advertising campaigns. 

So leverage these upcoming trends in PPC, get the competitive advantage of being an early adopter, and get those leads and conversions for your business.

At the same time, feel free to reach out to us if you want our PPC experts to create and implement custom-made PPC campaigns for your brand.