The list of Top PPC Influencers in 2020

The best and most underrated PPC tool is your brain. Everyone’s trying to automate and plugin their way to success, but they don’t stop to think about the needs of their prospects. What are prospects searching for? What do they need to know and believe about you before they’ll take action? Applying a little thought can get you further than dozens of paid tools.

Know how the pandemic is affecting your account. It might be weird to think of the pandemic as a “trend,” but it definitely is, and it has impacted your customers and your competitors. Pay close attention to what’s different and why.

The best tools to use in PPC depend on how you manage your account. If you’re using Google’s automated bidding, you usually just need to add a workflow tool like Adalysis.com to your stack to manage your accounts. If you aren’t using Google’s automated bidding and you need to bring in third-party data, then Kenshoo is a great tool. It’s common to see people use a third-party bidding system and a workflow tool at the same time.

Overall, these are our favorite tools:

1. Workflow — Adalysis.com
2. Bidding — Kenshoo.com
3. Audience management — Adobe audience manager
4. Analytics — Google Analytics, unless you’re using Adobe Audience Manager. In that case, Adobe Analytics or Google Analytics can work well.
5. Tag management — Google Tag Manager

COVID has changed how users view and interact with ads. Consumers are looking for more real-time information on deals, business hours, protection measures, business statuses, and other things. We’ve seen an increase in account performance for accounts that are making more ad adjustments to meet consumer expectations better than ever. The frequency of ad changes and the use of additional data with ad customizers is going to continue giving businesses an edge in marketing compared to those relying on old ad creation or automated Google ad serving techniques. While automation and machine learning will continue to be an important trend for years to come, this year we expect to see bigger gains from advertisers who are tightly controlling and updating their ad messaging than we have in many years.

I love Optmyzr for how quickly it can give insights and perform custom audits. Being able to see a quality score at the campaign/account level, for example, is handy for getting a snapshot into where improvements can be made. Unbounce would be my number one, though. The difference a fast-loading landing page can make on results usually outweighs smaller more incremental campaign optimizations — go Unbounce!

Machine learning isn’t the future of PPC: it’s the present. Smart bidding and dynamic creative formats are things to embrace to drive the best possible performance for your clients or business. It’s a big shift for many advertisers, of course, and where you add value will need to change. But being able to bid based on intent to convert is something I welcome. Our role now is feeding in the right data and giving that data the best possible conditions in which to perform. Make sure your conversion tracking is accurate and that only primary KPIs are included as “Yes” so you don’t end up being measured based on revenue but optimizing for mailing list subscribers! Ensure you include USPs and product or service features/benefits in your RSA headlines and descriptions. This is something we’ll continue to see is a trend moving forward, along with more updates to the Google Ads UI.

I’m always going to be a huge fan of XLS and Microsoft Advertising Editor / Google Ads Editor. :) Another tool that’s a must-have is a toolkit of scripts to automate and help with reporting and monitoring!

There are two trends, privacy, and data, that are converging right now and that PPC professionals and digital marketers alike need to keep in their periphery. Privacy and the impact that local, regional, and country-specific privacy initiatives will have on data collection and use. The desire for more user control of data is leading to a potential scenario of the cookieless world, threatening to impact the data we use for tracking, attribution, and audience targeting. When I talk about privacy and data, I see search marketers roll their eyes, and it’s because they’re thinking in the weeds, not at the bigger picture of how data restrictions might impact PPC campaigns. One of my favorite strategies in my PPC arsenal is using segmented audience targeting to reach our existing customers and net-new prospects. Without data, the strategies I create would be near impossible. It takes us back to targeting a keyword instead of targeting a person with intent who is behind the keyword.

The best PPC tool I have is SEMrush. Its keyword volumes are a lot more accurate than other tools I’ve used in the past, so it’s really useful when I’m forecasting.

One thing that I don’t think is too far off on the horizon is persona-based machine learning. Google and Bing ads are rapidly evolving, and it’s not going to be too long before you can plug in a persona for your audience and Google/Bing will write a high-converting ad for you. We’re nowhere near there yet, but I’d definitely keep an eye out. In the meantime, marketers have to focus on the basics. Build our customer personas to the nth degree. No level of detail is too small. When you know what devices, times of day, stages of the buyer journey, etc. your customer is at any given time, you’ll be unstoppable.

I would love to endorse Zest.is. This isn’t a PPC tool, but it’s the best knowledge resource I’m working with. It gives me the best, filtered, top-notch content on PPC, and it’s part of my morning routine.

I believe this year’s focus will be on first-party data. Now that Google has announced they will kill the third-party cookie, we’ll see most advertisers focusing their efforts on getting a betting understanding of their CRM, apps, and website pixel data.

We’ll see more and more advertisers try to manipulate between technical and legal restrictions (like GDPR and CCPA) in order to focus the right message to the right audience at the right time.

Optmyzr and Cleverads.com.

Google is pushing its automated tools (i.e. smart display campaigns) while removing the finetuning capabilities of marketers. So marketers who need sophisticated ad campaigns are losing control of them.

Google Ads, Excel, and Optmyzr.

The most important trends to watch out for are automated bidding, less search term data, less control over bids, and more intelligent conversion tracking.

It depends a lot on the needs of the sales funnel. For example, if you’re taking leads, you need some sort of CRM, but the number one tool for PPC is Microsoft Excel, hands down.

Marketing is taking a full circle. It used to be all about creatives, then things went online and advertising turned nerdy. A good online advertiser needed to know how to use these complex tools and numbers, but now the platforms are doing such a good job with targeting that the main differentiating factor is back to the creative.

The best PPC tool is email/the phone/Slack/another communications platform! Especially now in difficult trading conditions, the overall digital marketing objectives and business hypotheses must be business-led. Even the best technical expert in the world won’t know your company’s operations and customer base better than you. The best decisions are the basic technical tweaks made together with the business rather than clever technical adjustments made for PPC-only reasons!

Keep a very close eye on how Google is taking more fine-tuned options away from the advertiser. Removing many search queries at the start of September is a good example, as is the trend toward enforcing Responsive Search Ads (which are good overall, but not for every scenario, although Google is keen on making them so) and the simplification of and encouragement toward automated bidding. For many advertisers, these will work well, but when they go wrong, the number of options you have without technical expertise will be limited. It will pay to be wary! :)

The best tool is the one you and your team will actually use every week with every client. Think of what you need to do across the board for your clients and invest in a good tool to automate that. Personally, I love Data Studio for that reason. It removes what could be hours of mindless reporting work every week so we can focus on what provides more value.

2020 has been a wild year, and it’s quickly turning a lot of older trends on their heads. As people are less mobile than they were in the past, we’ve seen many mobile searches become desktop searches and many more searches become local. As these trends are evolving faster than any of us may notice them, it becomes increasingly important to understand how and when you can rely on AI/ML to optimize for microtrends before they emerge.

Optmyzr and Opteo. The former for data visualization and reporting, the latter for account alerts.

Increased adoption of automation. As an industry, we're finally getting over this hump where more people are embracing automation and smart campaigns... Some aren't as thrilled about this, but there's no turning back. The next step with this is finding creative ways to use automation to our advantage, and coming up with new ways to "guide the machine." There's a lot of creative ways to manipulate your conversion data, for example, so that you can better inform the machine about your business goals. These sorts of strategies will really move the needle in the coming automation era.