Google Ads – Things to look out for in 2022

Welcome to the PPC portion of The Evergreen Way. Here we are going to go over trends, tips, tricks and observations within the exciting world of Paid Search. As I’m sure you’re all aware, the Paid Search world moves fast so I shouldn’t be pressed for things to write about.

To begin, I am going to go over a few things that I think are going to be important in 2022. Some are big changes, some are a bit smaller but they are all things that are on our radar and things we are actively making sure we research and keep on top of so that we can make our campaigns as good as they can be.

Expanded Text ads being sunset and leaving just Responsive Ads

The first is that Expanded Text Ads are being removed in favour of Responsive Search Ads. Now, this has been known for a little while but is happening in June of this year. The reason this is big is because it takes away some control of how your ads are seen.

Responsive Search Ads ask you to input multiple headlines and descriptions and then Google will rotate them to see which ones perform best. It also isn’t the easiest to see the results of these. Fear not though because there are some ways to mitigate this with pinning headlines or using other methods.

A tip in the lead up to June would be to create some more Expanded Ads using different headlines and descriptions and look at data on what performs well, so you can make sure to have these in your Responsive Search Ads when they are the only ones you can use.

Further steps towards automation

In the vein of the above, Google Ads seems to be making moves to use more automation across all of Google Ads, not just text ads. “Great,” you think “I can just run these myself and let Google do its automated thing”… well hold your horses because whilst automation is getting a lot better, it’s still not perfect.

One of the key things we at Evergreen do is make sure that we are keeping on top of the data, analysing it and making sure that we are giving Google the right information to really make the automation tools we do use put out the best results.

Digital Marketing isn’t going to get less complicated because of automation, it’s probably going to need a much keener eye to make sure Google doesn’t run away with the automation and spend a lot of your money on poor results.

Performance Max campaigns

Another move towards automation is Google’s Performance Max campaigns. These are billed as a tool that “allows performance advertisers to access all of their Google Ads inventory from a single campaign.

It’s designed to complement your keyword-based Search campaigns to help you find more converting customers across all of Google’s channels like YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, and Maps.”

All sounds pretty amazing but again, these tools are still relatively new and are going to need oversight and careful data analysis to make sure they are working properly. It will be interesting to see what sort of results they get though.

First-Party Data

Google has delayed their move to removing 3rd party data a couple of times but it’s only a matter of time before it gets removed completely. This is a huge change and so it’s going to be important to keep an eye on the best ways to incorporate first-party data into your Google Ads account.

We’ll be looking at several options and making sure we have something in place and running before we lose 3rd party data.

Image Extensions

This is a relatively small one and has been out for a little while now, but I think we’re going to start seeing these start being more ubiquitous across Google and from a marketing perspective, that’s a great thing.

It means more real estate taken up when they show, it’s an image that is fantastic for showing off your product. Especially for e-commerce, I think these are going to be a really good tool and essential.

Audience and Buyers Journey

We as Paid Search marketers sometimes, and only occasionally for all of us I’m sure, focus a bit too heavily on the bottom of the funnel. After all, that’s where the conversions come from and if you get the right keyword and bid then you can monopolise the page and rake in the conversions.

Well with automation (there is a sort of theme to this post) and a move to broader applications we are going to have to start focusing on the overall buyer and knowing our audience a bit better.

Whilst we already do this to a good degree, with audiences and custom audiences, prospecting and brand awareness campaigns etc., I feel that it is going to have to become a lot more necessary as the future marches on.

So there we have six things to look out for in Paid Search for 2022, these are things that I have been seeing pop up last year and people talking about at the beginning of the year.

I think Paid Search is going to be very exciting across 2022 and onward and we at Evergreen will be keeping our ears to the ground to make sure we are at the forefront of knowledge in Paid Search and using all of this to improve our client’s campaigns.

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