2019 was truly a rapid growth year for both Google and Facebook alike. Paid media spend and the importance of leveraging search engine marketing for your business has grown to new heights.
If you do not have a presence online today. Whether it be a Facebook page, Google my business, or even a simple website.
You are missing out and trying to grow your business at a rapid pace will continue to be an uphill battle.
Google Ads runs my life. I live and breath paid media both at my full-time position and for all of my consulting work. It is amazing that in the last three years of my experience Google has added a multitude of changes to their search results page with the intent of providing users a more comprehensive and swift user experience.
What does this mean for the average website and business?
It is almost a requirement that if you invest in Google Ads today. You must be bidding on your DBA and or business name. This is crucial, as a combination of competition and maximizing your real estate on Google's search results is a MUST.
Another very important component to remember as we are rounding out the 2019 year is that Google provided additional Ad copy space to ads earlier in the year. IF you do not utilize the 3rd headline and 2nd description in your ad copy today. YOU ARE MISSING OUT.
These are some simple high-level basics that every business should continue to optimize for 2020 as competition and new features are released almost every month.
I'd love to say that 2019 was a perfect year for Google Ads and their updates however, they did make changes that have created some pitfalls for how paid search analysis will be conducted in 2020. A key change that rolled out in September revolved around the loss of "avg position". This change for automotive was a difficult pill to swallow as dealerships and manufacturers seek to control their ad position in Google.
This change almost requires that anyone who evaluates performance in Google Ads is well aware of the metrics for both absolute top impression share and top impression share.
It is clearly a new pain point for many businesses who now have to infer what both percentages correlate to when evaluating competition within their auction insights.
For a company that is so concerned with user experience you would think Google would want to provide metrics that make this analysis easier!
2020 will be a time of rapid change as Google and many others continue to aggressively capture the market's paid media spend.
As I've mentioned before, if you are not present in Google today the chances to capture a consumer who on average spends 4-10 hours a day on their Iphone almost becomes impossible.
It's truly key to stay on top of the game when using Google Ads. One key area that will change as we progress into 2020 will be the ability to further optimize spend and ROAS with Google's attribution features.
They recently implemented "conversion sets" into Google Ads which in turn helps pull similar conversion tags and metrics into categories of sets.
This feature will be especially useful for both the financial services and automotive industries as they both contain high volumes of research and prospective search behavior before final conversion. The overall consumer journey and "conversion window" is also much longer than that of a simple e-commerce site.
I apologize if the thoughts and ideas presented here have left you scatter minded and confused. It's clear that the changes and innovations being made within Google Ads today are going to have a lasting impact on performance in 2020.
Comments