- Spending on Google AdWords continues to increase: Spending on Google AdWords has grown 21% in the past year from 19% in Q4 of 2016, and the majority of this growth is hugely attributed to PLA’s in mobile search according to Merkle.
- Increase in Mobile Spend: Not a surprising finding at all. According to the study, there has been a 51% increase in mobile spend and a 12% increase in desktop spend, but a decline in tablet spend especially since Google has allowed advertisers to bid separately on both tablets and desktops.
- PLA ads are rising past text ads once again: PLA ads (product listing ads) accounted for 52% of retail search-ad clicks in Q1, which increased from 48% in Q4.
- Local Inventory Ads Are Improving: As compared to PLA’s on both phones and desktops, CTR’s for LRA’s were 19% higher and accounted for a whopping 19% of mobile shopping clicks in Google.
- Mixed Results for ETA’s: Expanded text ads are still showing mixed results which were first introduced last year. There was growth in CTR as compared to standard text ads, but only for desktop standard text ads at the bottom of the page.
- Mobile Results for Bing and Yahoo are dropping: Bing and Yahoo Gemini spend has been consistently dropping in the last couple years, falling by 14% in Q1.
It’s certainly valuable to discuss these trends. But we’ve already been advised by countless news sources what they are and what we can expect moving forward. So I think the better question to ask at this point is: what can we do to improve our results based on these findings? The answers are undoubtedly specific to your campaign goals, but we know for sure Google AdWords is the place to be, as opposed to Bing and Yahoo which have been consistently dropping in popularity in the last couple years.
It’s not surprising that mobile ad-spend has increased, but with such a finding it’s crucially important to begin constructing your PPC ads so they are appealing to mobile users. Because the rise in spend clearly indicates a rise in mobile search queries. So let us talk briefly about what you can do to capitalize on this trend as we’ve addressed before in previous posts. For one, make use of the AdWords IF Functionality as soon as you can. It allows advertisers to customize their ads based on device & re-targeting membership and text to be curated specifically to target audiences. Also make use of ad customizers to direct your audiences to specific regions of your website. And don’t forget landing pages. Creating a mobile friendly landing page can help you generate more conversions and experience the revenue growth you’ve been waiting for.
Clearly Google AdWords is the way to go as evidenced by the growth in the tool usage overall. But still, it’s important to understand the specific ad types that are generating results in order for you to improve your AdWords performance. According to ad spend, it’s PLA and ETA ads which are topping the charts. So start utilizing them. ETA’s (Expanded Texts Ads) allow you to improve your web traffic by allowing for two headlines, more characters, expanded description, and URL customization. And PLA’s (Product Listing Ads) are able to appeal to target audiences by ad placement and different visual formats. So don’t hesitate to utilize each in pursuit of generating more ad attention because clearly their effectiveness is translating to more spending according to the reports. And quite simply, revenue growth is all that counts.
A great way to continue this optimization process is to check out our Google AdWords Grader. In combination with the above recommendations, the AdWords Grader can help you identify areas of you account which need improvement. All you have to do is click here to get your results!