The latest in pay per click advertising and the digital advertising world 💰

The PPC world is ever-evolving. Deep, and blue, and full of clicks, there are tons to keep up to speed with at pretty much all times. But we’re here to help with that. 

Here are some updates on what’s new in PPC that we think you should know about:

Google and other giants pass costs of new Digital Services Tax to advertisers

I had a rant planned, but it’s probably not appropriate here. Just know that the DST – a 2% tax for international companies on profits made within the UK – is going to be passed onto the advertisers paying for those services.

This is something that will have to be accounted for in advertising budgets, so be sure to have these discussions when it comes to planning out your ad spends over the coming months

It’ll be billed as a separate line on Google’s invoices, so should be fairly easy to manage and keep track of – but it may result in new budget conversations having to be had with clients.

A new anti-fraud certification for advertisers seems to be working

Continued benchmarking from the Trustworthy Accountability Group (aka TAG) seems to show that their anti-fraud efforts have done wonders for the rates of Invalid Traffic from marketing campaigns.

Its certification is awarded through meeting the requirements of a programme that proves that there’s no fraudulent activity in any part of the marketing supply chain.

So, why’s this a big deal?

Well, leaping off from the massive shift to digital use, due to the Coronavirus pandemic, criminals have seen this as a similarly massive opportunity to scam people. This has meant fraudulent activity on all levels of the marketing pipeline – from companies paying for fraudulent traffic from naughty agencies to marketing agencies paying for services they never get.

The TAG certification seems to have dropped instances of invalid traffic by 88% for those signed up. Which is great news for those who want their marketing efforts to be seen by people instead of bots!

B2B companies struggling to produce enough content to meet sudden digital demand

Finding a good writer is like finding a good cheese, you can’t just pick up any old “Camembert-style cheese” and expect that exquisite ripeness only developed by cheeses allowed to graze on French fields. Well, I’m not sure if there’s a shortage of cheese, but it seems that there’s a shortage of writers.

35% of content marketing companies have struggled to produce enough content of a high enough quality to capture and retain audiences. This makes sense considering the time-investment great content takes, but is surprising that it wasn’t prepared for, given that decision-makers are now making many more decisions based on online content.

(Ahem, if you’re one of those caught short, get ahead of the curve)

Google is restricting search term reports

Queries in search term reports with low volume have begun to be restricted when they are deemed to have ‘insignificant’ volume – this could be as much as 28% of search queries.

Inability to see low-impression queries means advertisers can’t effectively do things like identifying negative keywords as well as they could do so before – and, although these may seem small-fry, the costs do and will add up. Especially considering that a single wrongly-bidded negative keyword can cost up to £5.

In practice, however, this change will have a more significant impact on accounts that are primarily managed manually. That’s because any query activity (whether relevant or not) won’t inform any bidding strategies that are in place – while we can’t see this data, remember, Google still can. So those who are making effective use of Smart Bidding will feel the strain less as any auctions ads are entered into will inform learning and performance moving forward.

Now, it’s worth not underplaying how significant of an impact this will be for those marketers it’ll affect (it’s not uncommon to see upwards of 50% of a budget be spent on fewer than 10-click queries) but in order to minimise the effects, marketers should make a concerted effort to move to smart bidding.

So that’s just a quick update in what’s going on in the world of PPC for 2020 Q4. If you’d like to know more about PPC – and how we can help you with your campaigns, then get in touch!