Marketing Trends to Watch and Apply to PPC

Features and enhancements in pay-per-click (PPC) occur regularly, but taking overall marketing trends and applying them to PPC gives advertisers an advantage over the competition.

Digital Coupons

While they still represent a smaller percentage of the coupons redeemed in stores, the digital coupon saved via mobile devices is sure to catch up with users’ increasing mobile behavior.

For PPC, offers can be communicated in a variety of ways:

1. First, ensure there is a landing page ready that reiterated the offer in the ad.
2. Use ad copy with offer and call to action (CTA) in headline or body copy to bring the sale home.
3. Use Sitelink extensions to communicate additional selling text, then link to several offers by categories, promotion type, or deals of the day.
4. New callout extensions allow an additional up to 25 characters of descriptive text in the standard text ad. These are not clickable, but rather can showcase some additional unique offers such as “free shipping” or “price matching” that can entice searchers to click on the ad.

Mobile Comparison-Shopping

Through apps and search engines, consumers can now easily compare prices, features, and availability even while shopping in the store.

Be sure to use location targeting in Google and Bing Ads to target areas closest to your stores with ads and then provide special promotions and offers customized to that specific location.

Location Finders – for Where to Buy

When buyers are comparison-shopping, especially for big-ticket items or during the holiday season, they will be using high-tech gadgets’ features to locate where to buy the items.

For PPC, be present in Google Maps through Google My Business, which connects maps with Google+ and search. Ensure all profiles are complete so that maps entries have as much information as possible for the searcher.

Product Reviews

Online reviews have evolved into must-haves for shoppers.

1. PPC advertisers in AdWords can use review extensions to surface positive reviews. The review extensions attach a review line to the ad. If you have a review or award from a third-party publication or organization, you can use it.

2. Seller ratings let people know which advertisers are highly rated for quality service. Seller ratings are automatically generated from Google from reputable sources such as Google Shopping and Google Trusted Stores and 29 third-party sources.

Social Engagement of Shopping Experience

With the increase in shopping this holiday season, we will be seeing many shoppers posting “likes” and opinions to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and more. They will likely post about the store or online shopping experience, deals, products, and customer service. Using these social platforms for ads is a great opportunity to get ahead of the game by becoming familiar to the audience.

1. For these social ads, consider the market you are targeting and customize the message to them – don’t use the same ad copy for all channels.
2. Develop-exclusive offers for users of that channel and information on the offer can be redeemed
3. Ask for a “share” in the ad so that highly engaged users are reminded to pass it along.

Are there any marketing trends you’ve been following that are perfect to apply to PPC? Tell us in the comments or tweet it out to @ClickZ or @LisaRocksSEM to discuss.