Google Ads and current trends

To gain traffic to channel into your website is a challenging task. You are competing with millions of other sites when it comes to keywords and others are paying and spending money on social media to get more hits. This is a lot harder if you try to get it through organic means.

The facts can sometimes be discouraging

Your site will not survive without hits and visits, that’s for sure. But if Google gets more than 60,000 searches every second, it will be marketing suicide not to use this for your marketing. After all:

The market value of Market is over US730 billion
Google commands 90% of the market share in the search engine market globally
A person carries out 3-4 search each day at average

The bigger challenge really is the fact that Google is constantly changing its system. This means that as an advertiser, you might not be able to ‘master’ any of these techniques for a long time. While it is not possible to know and learn everything Google does, knowing the trend will do your campaign a whole lot of good. Below are some trends to look forward to.

Google Lens

Using a native app, Google is able to recognize certain objects and places in Google Lens. This visual search engine is one of the new efforts to move away from text-based search. If you are in the business of clothing and uses barcodes or business cards, then this is one trend you should be riding on. Other areas that might be of interest to you include books, events, artwork and buildings. Basically, this is one area that Google is working on which incorporates AR (Augmented Reality).

Use Google Discovery

Discover is one of the recent launches by Google back in 2018 which is a personalized newsfeed platform. What it does is that users can get relevant content even if they are not searching for anything. The content is then placed in terms of interests, videos or blogs in ‘cards’. Available on the mobile app, this would then pave way for Discovery Ads by Google where the feed will feature ads. The content in this would very much like YouTube Ads.

Gallery Ads

Gallery Ads came around in 2019. If you are familiar with Carousel Ads, then Gallery Ads by Google is quite the same thing. Basically, this involves images that the users will scroll down to. According to Google, the results have been promising as their Gallery Ad reported 25% more interaction and they tend to appear on the top of search results (on mobile). This is one tool that will resonate well with businesses with a lot of visual ads. Note: Google has been diverting from text-only search ads in recent years.

Smart Bidding

In Google Ads, Smart Bidding is the way forward and it remains one of the major Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems from Google. Used for automated bidding, you use ‘auction-time bidding’ where machine learning is used to optimize the conversions for Google. Basically, you tell Google what you want to achieve in your campaign and Smart Bidding pretty much does the rest within the cost you pre-determined. This is a super-tool that helps in PPC (Pay-per-click) which will be extremely impactful.

Larger Target Audience

You need to use Google to target the right customer and now you can target more customers in the face. The rising trend through Google is in their Affinity Audiences and In-Market Audiences.

Affinity Audiences – Using Google’s platform for this means that you get to reach a new group of audience based on their browsing styles and trends. Some brands have reported over 200% conversion since using this service.
In-market Audiences – You will like this audience if you are looking for those who are pro-actively going through sites and comparing products (or researching them). Black Friday is one of the best times of the year to find them.

Voice and Google Assistant

Google will never fall behind Apple. The latter has Siri, so Google will have its own GA (Google Assistant). Users are expecting smarter phones now and with text-based search diminishing in popularity, it is no surprise that voice-assisted search will be the order of the day. If that is not convincing enough, then you might want to know that: