2023 is already a BIG year. It is the year where Microsoft has stopped supporting Windows 8.1 and Croatia joined the Eurozone adopting Euros as their currency. 2023 is also welcoming paid search advertisers into a new era.

So much has happened in the last couple of years that has caused online advertising and marketing to be propelled into the future. Advertisers are expected to change quicker and adopt new strategies faster than ever. Our priorities and work style have changed and will continue to change over the next couple of years. Below are things that we predict will be huge for PPC throughout 2023:

Performance Max campaigns will get better

We think Performance Max Campaigns will get better, which is good news! It may not feel like it now, but they will, they have to otherwise advertisers will stop using them. There was once a time when Smart Shopping was brand new and the majority of advertisers and merchants were hesitant to implement these campaigns, moving from a manual world and where they had control. However, with time, effort and understanding, these campaigns took off. 

Performance Max is likely to follow the same trajectory. Google has already announced that it will offer users more transparency by allowing them to exclude keywords and more beneficial insights. It is likely that more features and functionalities such as more sophisticated bidding strategies and settings that allow better control, are likely to be rolled out as we get to grips with the new campaign type. 

The rise of first party data & cross channel collaboration

You know the annoying data box that pops on the website asking you if you would like to accept the cookies? Well from now on, always answer yes. You ask why? Well that is because Paid Search Advertisers jobs will require these types of cookies to make campaigns perform better. We need to get to know our audiences better. For a long time, advertisers have been able to use some but not all 1st party data to create audience lists, however, with the search landscape getting more competitive and campaigns getting smarter, we need to start thinking outside of the box. 

This is where there is a huge opportunity to work with other marketing channels such as CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation), as CRO actively tests users to see how they interact with a business and a website. If PPC teams can use the data generated by CRO testing to find more similar users to those with higher conversion rates, we are able to build and expand a high qualified audience profile, one that can be built on and integrated into different channels.

As we mentioned, we believe that Performance Max will get better, but one way it will get better is by feeding the algorithm richer and more detailed insights, teaching the campaign to walk steadily before sprinting off in the ad race. So in 2023, we think that 1st party data will be a massive focus and by the end, we will rival a behavioural scientist in how humans live online. 

Investing in video

Thanks to Performance Max, video is likely to be an important investment for merchants and advertisers alike. The campaign creates a video for the assets unless one is provided, but very few retailers want a generic video that lacks their voice and touch. This is why investing in video creation will be more of a focus. At Visualsoft, we have a brilliant creative media team that create videos for a wide range of clients. And while video isn’t necessarily a direct converting channel, it is important for brand visibility, recognition and professionalism. To stay relevant in a world where new creations appear everyday, you need to ensure that you are able to stay visible to people wherever they go. 

Preparing for the rise in voice search

Many many years ago, we wrote about how Voice Search was going to see an uplift in paid advertising. It hasn’t happened at the same speed as we thought it would back in 2017, however, it is happening. Tech giants are getting smarter about how to interact with the average user and are always trying to simplify and make the exchanges more natural. 

The tech world also exchanges attention economy rather than just money, and one thing that they haven’t happened to exchange fully yet, is people's voices. It probably won’t look like a scene from ‘Wall-e’ or ‘I, Robot’ , however, more people are set to use digital voice assistants to help them find the best offers and promotions, especially when they are busy with their everyday lives. So being mindful of what search terms you are excluding and keywords you are including, can help find these users. 

Expanding by exporting 

Exporting has been something we have talked about over the last couple of years at Visualsoft, and each time we take five steps forward, a global event seems to happen. COVID, lockdowns, Brexit implications, war, cost of living and unstable currency. Which means, it has been hard to get people excited about global trading when there seems to be endless complications and obstacles in the way. However, exporting is set to get bigger and more of a focus for a lot of advertisers, and also by Google. 

Exporting has a lot of benefits for retailers. Exporting helps future proof your business by reducing reliance on a single market. It helps you shift stock, extend and broaden the customer base, enhance domestic competitiveness and benefits advertisers too. It helps paid search advertisers diversify strategies, scale campaigns and reach new users, and helps tap into new pools of users. 

And exporting, like Performance Max, will get better. The way it will get better is that companies are pivoting and changing tactics due to users' needs, thus new opportunities are born. For example, one of our partners, Glopal thrive in the opportunity to help retailers make global expansion a reality. Google has also weighed in on the battle of globalisation by releasing new features such as a Google Feed Translation Tool along with Video Translation services. As well as this, Google offers to translate existing campaigns into different languages free of cost, as they know their investment in a merchant will pay off when the merchant sees results. Exporting isn’t for everyone, but this will be a big push for the big majority of merchants that are able to ship products across borders. 

Continuous investment in your Google product feed

With so much of the manual work taken out from the shopping campaigns due to Performance Max, paid advertisers are able to put focus on other elements that sometimes don’t get as much priority as they should. Spending time and investing in your Google product feed will pay off. And continuously investing in the feed will pay off even more, as you are constantly evaluating and testing what works and doesn’t work, improving on what is good and changing what is bad. 

Visualsoft partners with a company called Multi-Feeds, which allows us to optimise and improve the feeds that we use. Retailers and merchants don’t have the time to invest in the feed, however, we work with different websites everyday, which means we spot trends and patterns and use this to optimise the feeds. With Multi-Feeds, we can get a report on elements of the product feed that you don’t get in Google Merchant Centre, enabling us to improve the feed further.