The 5 biggest challenges facing PPC marketers in 2024

In 2024, trends and hurdles are already taking shape for all PPC marketers. The changing landscape around privacy and data, in addition to continued economic struggles, is impacting most marketers.

But what are those challenges and how can we prepare and meet them? Here are the top five I foresee for the rest of this year.

1. Audience targeting

The end of third-party cookies and stricter consent rules will reduce the scope and use of data on websites. This means that your remarketing audience will shrink over time, reducing the impact of these campaigns.

First-party data will be more important than ever. The trade-off is that we become more reliant on leveraging and building on the data of our clients and businesses. Many people don’t understand its importance, and our job is to help them understand.

First-party numbers are significantly lower than GA4 audiences, Google Ads remarketing audiences, and meta custom audiences. This means moving to using that data directly as an actual campaign-level target audience and as a component to power your content. Smart bidding and automation features for your account.

The amount of audience data will decrease, but with the right approach and data collection strategy, quality should prevail.

2. Account optimization

Day-to-day campaign optimization has evolved significantly over the past few years. Improvements to Smart Bidding have changed your manual bidding habits. Negative keywords are still important, but they don’t take as much time as they used to. P-MAX has introduced a different approach to campaign analysis and optimization.

The new Demand Gen campaign type also enables P-MAX to run more effectively on Google’s recently popular child categories, accelerating the growth of campaign types with limited targeting inputs and insights.

Specifically, P-MAX reduces the amount of time you spend trying to improve performance in your Google Ads account.

Yes, the whole point of Google’s multichannel automated campaign types is to spend less time improving your tactics and more time on bigger strategic opportunities.

However, feed-based campaigns are focused on Google Merchant Center (GMC). This was an area where most he PPC marketers only needed to understand the basics. Now more than ever, it’s becoming an important battleground for improving campaigns through feed optimization.

Google knows this, which is why we’ve seen it evolve over the last few years with the addition of growth reporting features like Price Competitiveness Report, Bestseller Report, and Shopping Experience Scorecard. . A valuable resource to support the broader strategies Google wants to adopt.

But that’s changing with a full move to Google Merchant Center Next, which is arguably an easier way for retailers to manage their feeds. For advertisers, this is a new learning experience that they must adapt to.

3. Content

Like everything else on this list, the focus on content in search has evolved significantly over the past few years. We’ve gone from standard text ads to expanded text ads to now responsive search ads ad types.

The number of titles and descriptions has increased, but custom variations have decreased. Campaigns don’t (or shouldn’t) have endless ad groups tailored to a single keyword.

When it comes to performance, we remain skeptical about how Google uses creatives, so we often go against best practices to take back control with feed-only asset groups.

Allowing Google to prioritize titles and descriptions may be scary, but it’s increasingly becoming a reality. Yes, you can freeze the title and description, but new AI features are currently being rolled out, which gives you even more control when testing.

And if you’re willing to embrace evolution and hand over the keys to Google, your ads can lose credibility and originality. Giving up control is difficult for account managers and marketing departments.

With all advertising platforms moving towards AI content creation, the ability to stand out is becoming increasingly difficult and an opportunity.

AI will play an important role in PPC in the near future (again, this is an article in itself). But those who use AI to teach time-saving routines and content, rather than to create, will rise above the noise and succeed.

Let’s dig deeper: How generative AI is revolutionizing PPC

4. Tracking

In the past, this was much simpler, with most of us burying our heads in the sand and relying on web developers to pick up the slack. We still rely on its technical support, especially for some of its more advanced conversion features.

But with accounts relying more than ever on accurate conversion data and an ever-growing list of tracking features, advertisers need to be more savvy and proactive.

2023 was a big year with the move to GA4 and increased reliance on enhanced conversions. This is also true for Consent Mode V2, along with offline conversion tracking and (my personal favorite) profit tracking.

Although there is a wealth of information and conversion tracking courses available, many advertisers are still new to this area and many agencies do not offer tracking implementation directly as a service, even with the help of a Google implementation team. Is not …

But with the end of cookies, these features are no longer nice-to-haves, they’re a necessity. Only a minority of people are improving their skills and providing technical support and guidance, and when e-commerce is struggling, it is inevitable that many will ignore the needs of their clients.

Even with that support, many clients and businesses have shifted their internal goals from revenue generation and ROAS models to profit generation over the past year or so. This makes sense, considering the costs involved in things like shipping and manufacturing. In the margin. Again, advertisers tend to poke their heads around this. What are your ROAS or revenue goals? We will continue to work toward that goal. Profit is your problem.

Therein lies the opportunity, and while over 90% of e-commerce accounts are optimized for revenue or ROAS, neither is a priority goal for many businesses.

Some third-party tools (such as Profit Metrics) allow you to create conversion tags that only report profit per transaction. You can then optimize for return on ad spend at the campaign level. This could be a game changer for many accounts, and we can see the use of this type of tracking software increasing.

5. Report

I’ve already mentioned how we continue to wrestle with the black box of performance. Google has improved some of its Insights reports over the past year, but Mike Rhodes’ excellent P-MAX script continues to evolve and help us all. Still, with the introduction of AI capabilities, there are concerns that Google will continue to sweep some reports under the carpet to avoid a backlash.

How accurate will this data be if consent mode is expanded and restructured, even for account-level conversions? And how can users opt out of cookie tracking here? How will the decline in viewership affect GA4?

Over the past eight months, we have had to rely more than ever on platform reporting due to under-reporting of some parts of GA4. The Shopify and Magento reporting stacks aren’t as powerful overall as GA4, so you’ll need to take workarounds to select the most relevant data between each. This can be difficult for some clients who are just used to certain reports in Universal Analytics and need to adjust their internal reporting.

While many advertisers are still struggling to adapt to GA4, there are some new reporting features that add value. Although an equivalent switch may not be possible, continuing to learn GA4 custom reports and covering old UA reports with alternative his GA4 functionality is the best way to adapt.

As Google intended, Google Merchant Center’s advanced reporting allows you to make up for what’s lost from a tactical perspective within Google Ads Platform reporting with new strategically focused reports within GMC.

So we’re less likely to have conversations about what search terms are coming in through a particular campaign, and instead we’re talking about where our product’s price stands in relation to the market, or our bestseller shopping report. The conversation will be about what product catalog opportunities to look at based on. A conversation that the majority of retailers want to have because it’s a big question that will help them scale.

Tackling PPC marketing challenges

Clients will look to agencies and freelancers to help them navigate this advertising period and financial uncertainty. With disruption comes opportunity. Those who embrace and adapt to change will lead the way.