As someone who spends most of their time doing digital marketing, understanding the impact different technologies have on how PPC works and how I can better optimize for these practices is something I spend a good portion of my day on. While I am far from an industry expert in the field, I do know enough to understand what different changes in technology mean for Google Ads.

Smartphones are More Important than you Think

While it may seem obvious to pretty much anyone who has ever gone outside, everyone has a smartphone. The important part isn’t that people have them however, it’s that people use them for everything. While there maybe used to be a time where you didn’t have the answer to everything you needed in your pocket, that time is long gone.

The amount of web traffic that comes from mobile has been increasing constantly, and when it comes to search, mobile search drives over 60% of google’s paid ad clicks.

So what does this mean? It means it’s time to optimize for mobile, and maybe even think mobile first. Facebook and Google both help you optimize your desktop ads for mobile, but you should also think about what kind of content works better on mobile. For instance, while text ads are very effective on desktop, there is a lot of research that boasts the effectiveness of images.

Hey Siri, Find Me Somewhere to Eat

Virtual assistants have gone from a cool gimmick to something you can use nearly everywhere. And while virtual assistants in your home are probably what comes to mind when you think of this tech, 2/3 of people who use them, do so on their phone.

It blows my mind how often I go through reports on Google Ads full of searches that are clearly someone speaking to their phone. While these searches are input with voice, they often bring up a traditional Google Search on the user’s phone.

This means that a good deal of google searches are being fired off with voice commands. Given the overall effectiveness of long-tailed keywords in PPC search, and the likelihood of people to be significantly more descriptive when speaking instead of typing (slowly). By optimizing your keywords, and by paying attention to search terms reports, you can slowly optimize your campaign not just for mobile, but also for Siri.

Taking on PPC in 2019

Take it from someone who attempted to learn the entirety of the Google Ads suite in an entire week, there’s a lot going on there. While optimizing for new technology seems simple in theory, much of the work that has to be done to do is painful.

Nobody wants to spend their day doing long-tailed keyword research. Finding images that fit your ad, that you can use in your ad is a hassle. Not to mention producing your own. I’m lucky enough to live the agency life where I can send something off to a creative team, the reality is that it doesn’t always happen.

The point of this isn’t to be demoralizing, but to be aware of what effective Google Ads use is. A long slow haul, where you gain as much data as you can over a long period of time, and apply that research as effectively as you can. Nobody (probably) has built a successful ad campaign overnight, even in 2019.