6 Google Ads Trends That Could Cost You Your Rankings If Ignored

Every time Google modifies its ranking algorithms, SEO practitioners tremble in fear.

What’s going to happen to our ranking now?

Even the smallest changes to search engine optimization (SEO) algorithms can affect your Google ranking and cost you massive cuts in traffic volume within just a few hours. While Google does this to improve user experience and ensure only the best search results for its users, the search engine giant is also doing it to push advertisers into spending more on Google Ads because, after all, that’s how they make money – lots of it.

Why are Google Ads important?

Why should businesses put a lot of time and effort into Google Ads?

Google Ads allows marketers like you to make the most of online advertising. It lets you show your ads to the right people, at the right time, and in the right place.

Here are some more benefits that only Google Ads can offer.

1. Targeted ads – this means that you’ll be able to show your ads to people with specific interests, which should include your products and services. This can be done by using keywords, ad location, age, demographics, days, times, frequencies, and devices.

2. More control over your budget – there’s no minimum spend on Google Ads. You can choose how much or how little you want to spend per day, per month, and per ad. You only pay when a user clicks on your ads.

3. Ease of management of accounts/campaigns – you can save time and effort even if you’re managing multiple campaigns with My Client Center (MCC), which lets you access your Google Ads accounts from a single platform.

What are the most important Google Ads trends in 2021?

If you want to succeed, it’s important that you also pay attention to Google Ads trends. You should know what those trends mean to you and how you can use them to your advantage.

1. Performance Max

Experienced marketers don’t have a problem with running every Google Ads campaign using the same targeting options, which include a set of keywords to bid on and a set of placements where your ads will appear. However, new and small business owners who may have little to no experience might find it hard in running Google Ads campaigns.

Google understands this and so, they launched Smart Campaigns, which takes care of the optimization and targeting. Then, in May 2021, they released the Performance Max campaigns, which allows marketers to run new campaigns with as little human input as possible.

Marketers who are new to Google Ads would only need to provide the following:

• Ad creatives (i.e., copy, CTA, videos, images, etc.)
• Bidding (e.g., maximum CPA or target conversion)
• Objective or campaign goal (e.g., ROAS, CPA)
• Budget
• Language, location, and ad scheduling

Google’s goal is to make the optimization process simplified for advertisers by implementing real-time optimization, which can be done by using Audience Signals, such as remarketing lists or custom audiences. This allows Google to display more ads to a targeted audience, which means that it will be easier for advertisers to meet their conversion goals and at the same time increase their reach and conversion.

Another advantage of Performance Max campaigns is that it allows you to advertise on all Google channels, including Search, Gmail, Maps, Discover, and of course, YouTube.

2. Improved local campaigns format

When searching for something on Google, users used to type in “best pizza Singapore” or “best pizza 238858”; however, that has pretty much changed with the increased usage of Voice Search.

Recently, Google has added three new ways to promote businesses on Google Maps, which is the most popular navigation app for mobile phone users.

• Auto-suggest ads – shows a store in the auto-suggest search results every time a user searches for a business near their location.
• Navigational ads – shows a store based on the user’s location regardless of their location. This means that a user will see store suggestions in their navigation route even if they weren’t looking for something.
• Similar places ads – allows businesses to show their location to users searching on Maps for similar businesses in the area.
• Local inventory ads – allows businesses to offer products locally through their shopping network with the options “in-store today pickup”, “curbside pickup”, and “pick up later”.

3. Conversion modeling via Consent Mode

With the publication of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), SEO practitioners, including Google, were forced to adopt more stringent data privacy policies.

To get around it, Google launched Consent Mode in September 2020 to adjust how Google tags behave based on a visitor’s consent. While this move was to ensure that websites comply with the GDPR, a new problem was discovered.

According to Google, “When a user doesn’t consent to ads cookies or analytics cookies, Consent Mode automatically adjusts the relevant Google tags’ behavior to not read or write cookies for advertising or analytics purposes. Without cookies, advertisers experience a gap in their measurement and lose visibility into user paths on their site. They are no longer able to directly tie users’ ad interactions to conversions.”

Google then corrected the problem by making conversion modeling through consent mode. This update will enable the recovery of the attribution path between conversions and ad-click events. This allows websites to recover an average of over 70% of ad-click-to-conversions journeys. This is perfect for marketers from the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom because they are required to implement the Consent Mode.

4. Enhanced Conversions

Enhanced Conversions is another way to improve your conversion attribution modeling. It uses data your customers provide, including name, address, email address, and phone numbers. Enhanced Conversions hashes such information using the SHA256 algorithm and sends it to Google using your conversion tag. The search engine then matches the data with signed-in Google accounts and attributes it to your ad events, like clicks and views. Google says that they only report anonymized and aggregated conversions.

You can use Google Tag Manager or Global site tag to set Enhanced Conversions manually.

Experts say that marketers should add Enhanced Conversions before Google moves to first-party data in the near future. This is especially true if you depend too much on third-party data for your conversion modeling.

5. Shopify integration

Shopify has been a saving grace for the e-commerce market world. This is why Google has integrated Shopify to its Google Ads platform. The new Shopping Graph feature will pull data like product info, prices, and videos from different platforms to help buyers find the products they are looking for and to provide the necessary information, like product reviews and prices.

Because Google has made it free for marketers to promote their products on its shopping tab, the Shopify integration will now let sellers run their ads on all Google properties.

6. Instant Customer Match rates

The Customer Match feature lets marketers use online and offline data to target audiences across Google’s channels. Before this was introduced, marketers will need to wait and see to know their match rate. Since April 2021, advertisers can now see their Customer Match rates instantly based on current and past uploads. This allows you to identify and correct any customer match issue quickly and efficiently.

Final thoughts

These are just six of the many Google Ads trends that you shouldn’t ignore this year. As a marketer, it’s your responsibility to keep yourself updated with the constant changes in Digital Marketing. To get a good headstart, it’s also worth considering engaging an experienced Digital Marketing Agency on board to craft a unique solution for your business!