What's new in Google PPC ads that you should know

[Dimaeiya333]

The world of PPC advertising is constantly evolving. What new features has Google Ads introduced recently and what does this mean for your advertising campaigns?
The recent times have brought interesting and sometimes significant changes to the online advertising sphere . Small and medium-sized businesses have had to deal with difficult challenges, such as interrupted supply chains, changing consumer behavior and rapidly increasing inflation. Google, as a key player in this area, has responded to these challenges with a number of measures. This article focuses on the most significant changes in Google Ads in recent times. These changes include both positive trends and some risks that could affect the effectiveness of advertising campaigns.

1. Lead costs are increasing in (almost) all areas
Google Ads benchmarks show that the cost of acquiring a lead has increased significantly across 91% of industries. While the average overall increase is 19%, the arts/entertainment, travel, and furniture industries have seen increases of 134%, 69%, and 54%, respectively.

The data suggests that factors such as high prices due to inflation, plus ads being shown on queries with low business intent, have led to a decrease in conversion rates , and therefore an increase in CPL.

2. Expanded text ads have come to an end
The world of PPC advertising has been evolving in recent years, including in the area of ​​text ad formats on Google. Since 1999, when advertisers began manually writing, testing, and optimizing their PPC ads , the process has undergone many changes. In 2016, Google doubled the size of standard text ads with expanded text ads , and two years later, i argentina mobile database n 2018, these Expanded Text Ads grew even larger. However, in June of the following year, Expanded Text Ads were discontinued, marking the end of the format that had defined PPC advertising for many years. This change brings with it the need for advertisers to adapt their ad creation strategies to new trends and formats.

Instead, Google's new default ad type is Responsive Search Ad (RSA) , which allows advertisers to provide several different text assets from which Google will assemble an ad that is generated for each search.

This asset-based, machine learning-driven ad format has significant potential to display over 40,000 unique ad variations with enough assets. However, critics are quick to point out that RSA can create some bad combinations and may not always perform well. This change effectively limits brands’ control over the tone of their ads and testing processes in the SERP.

3. Smart Shopping and Local Campaigns are also over
Ecommerce advertisers are familiar with Shopping ads. In 2018, Google launched the Smart Shopping campaign type , which helps businesses promote their Shopping ads across search, display, and YouTube. With just a product feed in Google Merchant Center, reaching high-value placements across the web was easily accessible to all small businesses. Similarly, in 2019, Google introduced Local campaigns, which help local businesses promote their Google Business Profile across Google Search, Maps, Gmail, Display, and YouTube.

Both of these campaigns offered small businesses a great return on investment with smaller budgets and helped automate much of the campaign management. However, earlier this year, Google stopped allowing advertisers to create either of these campaign types and began automatically "upgrading" them to the newest Google Performance Max campaign type.