PERFORMANCE MARKETING
The Future of Search Advertising
How The Black Box will do literally everything for you. And why.
Hi, there. My name is Roman. And it’s my 7th year in Search Advertising. Throughout the time, I did advertising in almost all major search engines from Google and Bing to Yandex and Baidu, as well as I tried nearly all business niches. One of my insights was, despite vast differences between these search giants, they all have a common understanding of how to develop Search Engine Advertising in the upcoming years.
Trying to remove the human from all equations — is trend number one you can see in this marketing area. Google, as well as Microsoft and Yandex, put enormous effort into automating all complicated parts. The promised land is pure — to make a one-button solution. And they are not far from that, to be honest.
In 2019 we already have Responsive Ads, extended match types and automated bidding tROAS/tCPA as recommended “Best Practices”. Mobile campaigns working much better without human interference. And I’m pretty sure we see DSA as Best Practice in the next few years.
The complexity of Search Ads was always a problem
Search Engine Advertising is the number one channel for thousands and thousands of startups and companies. Some companies, like Booking, rely so much on it — their spent can go up to numbers with nine zeros. (source CNBC)
But there was never a problem to make a big company use advertising system of #1 search engine in the world.
Such companies have money and resources to invest in this channel. On the other hand, it’s complicated to move small advertisers and early-staged startups to Google Ads. And the main reason, besides the traffic price, — it’s an extremely complicated system.
To build one’s first profitable search campaign, one needs to put a lot of effort into developing a structure, finding keywords, writing ads, calculating bids, and, most important, performing continuous optimization. There is no surprise that for some companies, it’s just impossible.
The same problem happens with small & local businesses. This type of business is very limited in time and resources, business owners can’t put hours in marketing self-education, and professionals marketers are too expensive to hire.
I would assume, that all these problems together make it difficult to acquire new customers to grow Google Ads. As well as conquer more traditional markets or less populated areas.
There is one thing everybody has
Development of the internet in the past ten years went so fast that even small businesses today understand the need for investment into the company web site. Besides, it became much more convenient and cheaper to do with Tilda, Shop Scripts, Wordpress, etc., than it used to be even five years ago.
Content on these sites is structured in a much better way than it used to be. Most of these site engines support basic SEO optimizations. Besides, some businesses invest in additional SEO optimization.
It became common knowledge that SEO stays with a company for years.
Whereas search engine ads stop the moment, they run out of budget.
At the same time, Google became much smarter with the understanding sites. The machine is now better with detecting auto-generated content, finding the best headlines and description for the search result page, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Google can even identify a text author by its style.
The amount of personalized results is also increasing — Google mixes search results based on user behavior and browsing history. This big fellow knows what I like and what I want. Usually, even better than best marketers.
The true beauty of DSA
It’s much more profitable and more comfortable way for Google to re-use resources into Google Ads, which it already allocates to build the world's best search engine. Bringing to paid advertising a fantastic system, that generates headlines and landing page contents, and taking into account user's behavior is fascinating.
Making a smart DSA, that generates ads based on actual search trends, will solve the problem of a complicated start. Any business can concentrate on creating a site and landing pages — Google will take care of advertising.
One doesn’t need to hire an expensive specialist anymore, or continuously do keyword expansion.
Of course, this kind of system would require a complicated, self-educating system of bidding. Something that would take into account business metrics and combine it with internal auction data. And again, we see how much effort Google put in making tROAS and tCPA number one best practice.
Automated bidding already provides more extensive possibilities, that can’t be reached by external bidders.
Making DSA and automated bidding, Google reduce the number of keywords to work with, reduce costs of API support for all trillions of bid changes from external bidders. Google brings the possibility to start ads for millions of advertisers all over the world with just a few clicks. And reduce available data.
And Ads can generate more revenue
The machine decides what users should see an ad, and the machine chooses which ad to show, and also when. If Google has information about user behavior, conversion data, and landing page experience, Google can display ads only when they are highly relevant.
Unlike with common keywords + manual CPC strategy, Google can ignore part of the auctions and participate in others based on hidden metrics. And bringing a better experience for users who search and bringing better traffic quality to companies. Also, a huge bonus — selling better traffic allows Google to increase the price for it.
In other words, Google will be able to sell a better product for a higher price for a broader range of companies. Earn more, sell less and make everybody happy.
Although we are not there yet
The picture of the one-button solution for Search Ads might be fantastic news for some; when it would be terrifying for others. A very young job of SEM manager, which appeared less than a decade ago, is now moving fast to its extinction.
But don’t worry about it too much. Firstly, we are not there yet. tROAS, tCPA, responsive ads are great. But Google is still bad in understanding complicated accounts structure, DSA is not that smart, and well-designed automation with great specialists can easily beat DSA results.
Besides, I would expect Google to bring these changes slowly. As well as each new step towards complete automation is more and more complicated. Google requires a lot of data today to do its automation solution work. tROAS is very hungry about conversions, as well DSA is hungry of SEO pages.
It might take another ten years before we see a real complete, autonomous DSA.
Yes, there is a high chance all this will change a lot in the upcoming decade, but we still have a lot of time to adapt. Especially when we remind ourselves, there is more than one language in the world. And solutions to English not always work well for Finnish, French or Japanese.
Disclaimer: This article represents the personal Author’s opinion. No private or public data of Google, Microsoft, Yandex or other companies were used. This article does not represent any companies opinion.
