Predictions for the paid search landscape in 2015

12 Jan 2015 Dominic Comments Off on Predictions for the paid search landscape in 2015

The paid search landscape is continually evolving and improving with powerful new functionality and a continual need to provide more powerful and better search for advertisers.

So going into 2015, what do I think will be the main changes in the coming year within paid search? Below just gives you a flavour of what I think some of these will be and how they could affect small businesses.

Paid Search and Mobile

Last year many retailers will have seen an unprecedented rise in mobile visits to their site – with not all of these companies actually having a mobile friendly site. Going into 2015, we will see this rise in mobile visits continue – so for any of you who do not have a mobile site then act now!

Mobile paid search will go mainstream in 2015 with more companies revising each channel customer experience and paying more attention to the mobile channels conversion rates and customer experience – focusing on streamlining and revising landing pages for mobile.

Keyword targeting

As Google has released Penguin and Hummingbird updates, we can be sure that there will be continued focus on how ads are displayed with the intention to improve search relevance. This could actually see the phasing out of a pure keyword focused targeting strategy and move more into displaying ads based on a combination of key phrases, behaviours, search history and additional factors.

PLAs (Product Listing Ads)

I managed the set-up and launch of PLAs with 2 companies back in the day – where there was no real appetite to promote at a product level. Today any retailer with their salt should be pulling at least their key products together in their product feeds and pushing them out via the Google Merchant Centre. I think PLAs will increase in dominance in particular as the above changes are made also.

Product searches have been on the rise in recent years, in particular with Amazon and, with the roll-out of Google Shopping Express in the US, we will see Google trying to bring back more and more product searchers back to Google

Video Ads and Paid Search

Youtube revenue is on the rise, Facebook video advertising is on the rise, server capacity increases and customers appetite for a better experience all mean that over the next few years we should eventually see more of a focus on video content – on site and in advertising. As over 50% of retail traffic should be coming from mobile, so this further will put more of a demand on retailers to provide high quality video content – localised and personalised.

Call Tracking

Call tracking has been prohibitively expensive over recent years for most small businesses so what do you do? Well now that Google has launched Website Call Conversions, small businesses can take advantage of free call tracking software. With the rise in mobile so do we see a higher percentage of mobile browsers going on to call that company (70% according to Google)

Multichannel focus

A few years back it was fairly straightforward to manage your paid search campaign – with limited other advertising channels and most of the traffic on desktop you could understand your customer interactions. Nowadays the landscape is very different with so many more channels, more complex interactions, more devices and more of a focus on multichannel.

With this comes a need to understand your customer behaviour more holistically so I think we will see a move away from the PPC / SEM analyst into a world more demanding of marketeers who understand the new search landscape and can move with developments.

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Tags: Paid Search