Lomax PPC 2021 Review

As we fire on all cylinders into 2022, we wanted to share some insights into our priorities as an agency for the coming year. 2021 was certainly an eventful year full of ups and downs in the world of digital marketing, PPC and in wider aspects of our day to day lives. Throughout the wins and challenges, we have been honoured to share that journey with a some high quality agencies and private clients.

This year saw our business grow from one lone Xoogler to a team of four people, working together to service your accounts faster and in more detail than ever before. We moved to a new office, converting our digital nomad backstory into a bricks and mortar location. We believe that this gives more stability to our clients and more structure to continue to grow together.

In 2021 we looked after over £3 million of budget across our client accounts. We cannot be prouder to have grown to this size and look forward to working hard to beat this in 2022.

In relation to Google Partners, both ourselves and the agencies we work with are fully certified and qualified for the new program in 2022.

Unfortunately, with the sunsetting of the Premier Partner badge as we know it and any agency focussed support, it has become very obvious over the last year that Google wants to reduce the amount of resources put into supporting partner agencies. For Lomax PPC this means more opportunity to fill the gap left by those services and offer quality Google Ads support to new agencies who want to offer PPC to their clients but don’t have the knowledge or time to do so.

2022 ROADMAP

PRIVACY & TRACKING

One of the big challenges of 2021 has been the deterioration in data quality due to changing privacy laws and functionality on platforms such as Chrome and IOS. With Google’s plan to phase out cookies by 2023, we can see that these changes will only be built upon going forward. These major changes to what we can allow for in tracking mean that we need to adapt in order to continue to understand who our customers are and continue to grow our audiences on that basis.

The newly released Google Privacy Playbook offers a good collation of the new and developing methods of tracking & protecting privacy. The main takeaways are that first party data will continue to grow in importance and we should be capitalising on it.

For businesses inside the European Economic Area including the UK, accounts should be using the newly available Consent Mode which aims to recover conversion data which is lost due to protecting privacy. Through conversion modelling, Google states that around 70% of lost conversions can be recovered.

It is also important that we implement Enhanced Conversions on accounts which have this option available (currently rolling out of beta). This new feature uses consented, user provided data to give a more accurate view of what exactly is leading to conversions after initial ad engagement.

We should also be using as many customer lists as are available to us and we should update them regularly, this first hand information on customer profiles is invaluable with the current & ongoing privacy issues. It allows us to build a customer profile based on existing clients which assists in many areas, not least in automated bidding.

The use of these features will allow higher performance from automated bid strategies and smart campaigns, which leads us nicely to the next big topic for 2022.

AUTOMATION

With the growth of Discovery, Performance Max, Smart Shopping and Smart campaigns in general, we cannot ignore that automation is becoming a huge part of marketing with Google Ads. We predict that advertisers that are reluctant to lean into machine learning will be the ones who see results suffer most in 2022.

The skill is being able to identify in which areas Google’s software is terrible at automating and in which areas it is a winning strategy. For example, the eradication of broad match modified keywords and the increased push by Google for broad match keywords has been supported by Google case studies of success using this method. However, our own extensive testing has shown that this works best on robust accounts that are performing well on the existing search keyword selection of phrasal and exact matches. We calculate that this is due to the high level of conversion data and being well established on the search engine. Where broad match hasn’t worked well is in campaigns which are not yet where they need to be in terms of results or where the keywords are very niche or have crossover with unwanted targeting eg where a B2B and B2C market exist and you only want to target one of the two.

As PPC marketing continues to develop, we will likely see less and less dependency on keywords and more and more on audience building and understanding intention. This is evident in the rise of Performance Max and other smart campaigns which we used with great success in 2022.

We need to work hand in hand with Google’s automated options, building quality audiences and conversion data in order to really drive success. In particular, we want to spend more time on Performance Max campaigns which have shown us great potential. We also want to do more Smart Shopping for clients we identify as being suitable candidates for success in this channel.

More than anything, we need to be willing to try new automated campaigns as they debut and identify where they are the most profitable choice for our clients. We have to appreciate that these new methods are constantly being developed and just because something doesn’t work well now, doesn’t mean that it won’t work if we try again in 3 months.

LEAD QUALITY

As more and more advertisers choose to turn to the Google Ads platform, the competition in most industries has risen solidly year on year. This has meant that the old mentality of buying as many leads as cheaply as possible is no longer holding up as a viable GAds strategy. Instead, what advertisers are seeing is that when leads are being bought very cheaply, the quality of leads can be poor, often making them less profitable than higher cost leads.

This makes sense from an auction mentality perspective. The price of the lead represents the interest in it so the higher the price, the more desirable it is to bidders. Just imagine going to a car auction and nobody is bidding on the old banger because they don’t see the value in it. It’s the same situation in a Google Ads Auction, nobody wants that lead so in most cases neither should we for our campaigns.

In order to really understand the quality of leads, we should be integrating our CRM systems into the Google Ads platform. If this isn’t possible, we can have the data passed back manually. This is all related to Offline Conversions. It does involve a bit of set up on both our side and yours but the importance of the data more than justifies this work.

RESPONSIVE ADS

You may have already noticed that we have stopped building Expanded Text Ads and in some cases we have been deleting the existing. This is in anticipation of the sunset of ETAs in June 2022.

Responsive ads with full assets will test over 44,000 different combinations and permutations of those assets. Therefore, running these alongside 2 or 3 ETAs with only one permutation doesn’t make any sense from a data quality perspective. As always, we are leaning into the new norm, before it becomes forced on us by Google. This puts us ahead of the competition by having at least six months to build decent data to change assets until we have the perfect responsive ads, which we then keep up to date by swapping out the less popular assets and including any seasonal or new information to attract buyers.

GA4

The new analytics platform has certainly been met by mixed opinions, with a lot of experienced developers citing just how tough it is to use. As this has rolled out of beta, it has been met with a lot of resistance.

However, despite teething issues, we have to accept that GA4 will become the standard to use and it should offer a lot more streamlining in understanding the user journey across different platforms and devices.

As an agency, we want to embrace GA4 this year, using our extensive knowledge of tagging. We will start with our lead generation accounts as the ecommerce tracking is still lagging behind UA Analytics quite significantly.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

2022 will see the addition of an apprentice graphic designer to the team. As she is an apprentice, we will be working to build a portfolio for both her and the business. This will be an opportunity to have graphics produced for free so do let us know if you want to capitalise on that opportunity.

CONCLUSION

We have tried to pick out the things we see as most important to our combined success in the New Year but we realise that there may be specific topics that you want to discuss, whether its new campaign types, extensions, beta products, sunset solutions or anything else.

If this is the case, all you need to do is get in touch and we would be more than happy to offer our insight.

Once again, thank you so much for continuing to use Lomax PPC and we are looking forward to a fantastically prosperous year, driving revenue and value for all our clients.