The cornerstone of PPC has always been search, however the overarching theme from the past few years is a sharp increase in technologies and platforms utilized by marketers to aid the performance of their overall PPC efforts. With the continued popularity of conversion rate optimization strategies, more sophisticated capabilities within search and expanded targeting in social and display advertising, it’s becoming easier to truly personalize a user’s experience based on their behavior, preferences, and locations.
With the State of PPC, Hanapin Marketing’s annual survey of the pay per click (PPC) advertising industry, we look under the hood of advertising’s fastest-growing industry and find out what makes it tick, year by year.
After surveying search marketing professionals from a variety of brands and digital marketing agencies, we’ve found some nice trends and key takeaways from 2015 and leading into 2016.
70% of advertisers reported increases
to their PPC budgets for PPC 2015
When we did the State of Paid Search survey last year (now State of PPC), only 10% of the respondents said they planned to increase their budgets for 2015, so to have over 70% actually end up increasing their budgets is huge! PPC is not only growing, but advertisers are seeing the benefits and value in putting their marketing dollars towards PPC.
Text Ads are still the most proven ads for a business
The mix of PPC channels continues to expand every year; Text ads, remarketing ads, and mobile ads have proven to be the most valuable and effective ads for most businesses. However, shopping ads, social ads, programmatic advertising, and native ads are steadily growing in popularity and becoming more important to a business’ marketing mix. Will this be the case next year or will the channels that are growing begin to close the gap with text, remarketing, and mobile ads? (Let us know what you think in the comments below!)
78% of advertisers felt really good
about their PPC success this year
Not only do majority of advertisers feel really good about the success they’ve had in PPC advertising this year, but most feel even better about the market this year than they did last year. With success and a very positive outlook for the future, almost half of all advertisers plan to increase their PPC budgets next year. That’s huge! It also means that the PPC industry is only going to grow and expand and shows no signs of stopping in the near future!
How will budgets change in the next 12 months?
We asked respondents which channels they plan to put more money into next year and predictably, mobile ads led the charge. Not far behind are Google Adwords, Facebook, and Bing – all channels that are working hard to help advertisers really personalize the buyer journey and create a better experience for both the advertiser and users.
We’ve just touched on a few key trends and takeaways from this year’s survey results. If you want to see the full report, click the button below!
