As anoth­er excit­ing year of PPC mar­ket­ing nears its end, it’s time to look toward 2016. As you pre­pare your PPC mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy, here are some key areas of focus for brands and busi­ness­es to suc­ceed with paid search, dis­play, and retar­get­ing in 2016.

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Clear­ly, mobile was a big PPC trend for 2015 that could­n’t be ignored, and con­tin­ues to be – because con­sumers are mobile. But as the New Year approach­es, one PPC trend is clear: 2016 will be more about tar­get­ing the right peo­ple at key moments of the con­sumer jour­ney.

The shift from tar­get­ing key­words to tar­get­ing peo­ple and intent is get­ting increas­ing­ly pre­cise and sophis­ti­cat­ed, thanks to tools such as Cus­tomer Match and Remar­ket­ing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA).

Tech­nol­o­gy is also get­ting bet­ter – machine learn­ing and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence might just give your brand the edge in ad copy and land­ing pages.

Anoth­er key for PPC suc­cess will come from com­bin­ing and mak­ing sense of the insane amounts of data to tru­ly under­stand the con­sumer jour­ney and then use those insights to dri­ve more rev­enue.

This year, Momen­tol­ogy has col­lect­ed insights from 24 PPC experts:

• Tim Ash, CEO of Site­Tuners
• Lau­ra Collins, PPC Team Leader, Periscopix
• Bryan Eisen­berg, Founder & CMO, Ide­alSpot
• Justin Freid, Vice Pres­i­dent of Emerg­ing Media, CMI
• John Gagnon, Bing Ads Evan­ge­list, Microsoft
• Daniel Gilbert, Founder, Brain­labs
• Zvi­ka Gold­stein, VP of Prod­uct Man­age­ment, Ken­shoo
• Andrew Good­man, Pres­i­dent, Page Zero Media
• Pauline Jakober, Founder & CEO, Group Twen­ty Sev­en
• Jen­nifer John­stone, Asso­ciate Direc­tor of Bid­d­a­ble Media, Pis­ton
• Lar­ry Kim, Founder, Word­Stream
• John Lee, Man­ag­ing Part­ner, Clix Mar­ket­ing
• Melis­sa Mack­ey, Search Super­vi­sor, gyro
• Eliz­a­beth Marsten, Direc­tor of Paid Search, Com­merce­Hub
• Daniel Mor­ris, Direc­tor of Prod­uct Mar­ket­ing, Marin Soft­ware
• Christi Olson, Founder, ISEM Con­sult­ing
• Diane Pease, Inbound Mar­ket­ing Man­ag­er, Cis­co
• Marc Poiri­er, CEO & Co-Founder, Acquisio
• Lisa Raehsler, Founder, Big Click Co.
• Zack Schroll, Direc­tor of Mar­ket­ing, Hanapin Mar­ket­ing
• David Szetela, VP of Search Mar­ket­ing Oper­a­tions, Bruce Clay Inc.
• Katy Tonkin, VP of Dig­i­tal Strat­e­gy, Point It
• Fred­er­ick Val­laeys, CEO and Cofounder, Opt­myzr
• Pur­na Vir­ji, Senior Bing Ads Client Devel­op­ment & Train­ing Man­ag­er, Microsoft

Here are the PPC trends you need to know for 2016.

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Tim Ash, CEO of SiteTuners

Mobile con­ver­sion will be key. Many peo­ple are using their phones for Inter­net brows­ing and research. If they click on your ad and it is not mobile opti­mized, you will lose that impa­tient and kinet­ic vis­i­tor (prob­a­bly for­ev­er).

Make sure that you do not sim­ply cre­ate a “respon­sive lite” ver­sion of your desk­top land­ing page – rear­rang­ing the con­tent into a sin­gle col­umn and resiz­ing the text to be more read­able. Mobile land­ing pages require a clean-sheet approach, and often very dif­fer­ent calls to action.

Also con­sid­er the fact that you may not have a land­ing page, and opti­mize your call-cen­ter expe­ri­ence for click-to-call mobile vis­i­tors.

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Laura Collins, PPC Team Leader, Periscopix

In 2016, audi­ence tar­get­ing will become more impor­tant than ever for PPC mar­keters. In the last cou­ple of years we’ve already seen a notice­able shift in focus from key­words to audi­ences, but the recent release of Cus­tomer Match by Google will rev­o­lu­tion­ize the way we’re able to com­mu­ni­cate with our users.

We can final­ly tap into a wealth of cus­tomer infor­ma­tion that’s been locked away in CRM data­bas­es for years to cre­ate tru­ly bespoke, tar­get­ed cam­paigns.

Search cam­paigns will be freed from the shack­les of the 180 day mem­ber­ship dura­tion for RLSA audi­ences, bring­ing a host of oppor­tu­ni­ties for sea­son­al prod­ucts or sub­scrip­tion-based ser­vices. We’ll be able to seg­ment audi­ences in ways that sim­ply weren’t pos­si­ble before.

Our cus­tomers may be liv­ing an increas­ing pro­por­tion of their lives online, but what they’re doing in the offline world is just as impor­tant for deter­min­ing their inter­ests and poten­tial future shop­ping behav­iors. In 2016 Cus­tomer Match will play a piv­otal role in bridg­ing the gap from offline to online, get­ting us clos­er to our audi­ence than ever before.

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Bryan Eisenberg, Founder & CMO, IdealSpot

2016 is going to the year where we begin to see brands use machine learn­ing or arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to enhance their ads, land­ing pages, and fun­nel com­mu­ni­ca­tions.

I am see­ing com­pa­nies like PhraseTech (A.I. rewrites retail­er’s prod­uct page copy) and Per­sa­do (A.I. writes dis­play ad copy, emails, SMS, etc.). Com­pa­nies like PhraseTech will allow brands to com­pete on fac­tors no one could man­u­al­ly.

They will be able to pro­duce at scale, fresh (changed fre­quent­ly), rel­e­vant and per­son­al­ized prod­uct copy that no team of humans could ever do. We all know how the search engines love fresh con­tent on the organ­ic side, what makes most of think it does not impact Qual­i­ty Scores on the paid side?

It is time to wel­come our machine assis­tants.

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Justin Freid, Vice President of Emerging Media, CMI

There is no doubt that dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing received some feed­back this year that we are not doing our job cor­rect­ly. This rise in ad block­ing should make us, as mar­keters, shift our focus from pro­mot­ing a brand to pro­vid­ing our audi­ences with a solu­tion or answer.

As more data becomes avail­able from a myr­i­ad of sources, we’ll con­tin­ue to mold our cam­paigns and respons­es to the indi­vid­ual. From wear­ables and social demo­graph­ic data to your search his­to­ry, the amount of infor­ma­tion adver­tis­ers have about a spe­cif­ic indi­vid­ual is astound­ing and will be uti­lized to cre­ate a tru­ly cus­tomized expe­ri­ence.

Imag­ine a sce­nario where you are walk­ing down the street, through blue tooth near field tech­nol­o­gy, a dig­i­tal bill­board access­es your recent search his­to­ry, your body tem­per­a­ture and steps walked today from your smart watch and phone. Through this infor­ma­tion, the auto­mat­ed sys­tem can deter­mine you have a cold with a fever. The dig­i­tal bill­board puts your impres­sion up for auc­tion into a pro­gram­mat­ic trad­ing deck, hav­ing the likes of CVS, Wal­greens and oth­er phar­ma­cies bid for your impres­sion. Based on your loca­tion, CVS deter­mines they have a loca­tion two blocks from where you are locat­ed. They deter­mine you are a tar­get worth pay­ing for and you are shown an ad, with cold med­i­cine and direc­tions to their loca­tion on the dig­i­tal bill­board.

This is just one exam­ple of how I see the way ads are served chang­ing over the next year. Huge, annoy­ing ris­ing star ads or mobile screen takeovers will begin to stop, and adver­tis­ers will begin focus­ing on deliv­er­ing a solu­tion to the con­sumers ques­tion or need.

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John Gagnon, Bing Ads Evangelist, Microsoft

In 2016, we’ll see inter­est­ing trends in PPC due to the rise of per­son­al assis­tants and machine learn­ing becom­ing more eas­i­ly avail­able.

Expect more search­es out­side the box in 2016. Think about Siri, Google Now, or Cor­tana for a moment. As per­son­al assis­tants grow in pop­u­lar­i­ty, it cre­ates a new way for peo­ple search­ing out­side the brows­er.

These per­son­als assis­tants are baked right into the lat­est oper­at­ing sys­tems. Cor­tana is already on 110 mil­lion Win­dows 10 devices (with more than a bil­lion queries) while Google Now is on a huge num­ber of Android devices – the search trend will con­tin­ue!

The vol­ume of data is explod­ing for mar­keters to ana­lyze and tar­get from! Pio­neer­ing dig­i­tal mar­keters are now using Ama­zon and Microsoft Azure Machine Learn­ing ser­vices to begin to uncov­er their most valu­able adver­tis­ing seg­ments in a sea of data. There is a big oppor­tu­ni­ty to get ahead of the pack in 2016.

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Daniel Gilbert, Founder, Brainlabs

For me, this is the year that peo­ple-based mar­ket­ing will explode. Espe­cial­ly in paid search, where Google have intro­duced the abil­i­ty to upload email address­es to cre­ate audi­ence tar­gets. This is prob­a­bly the biggest sin­gle change since the dawn of AdWords — and we’ve already seen game-chang­ing results by build­ing strate­gies off the back of this new capa­bil­i­ty.

With Atlas becom­ing more acces­si­ble as 2016 pro­gress­es, I imag­ine we’ll see sim­i­lar improve­ments in the Pro­gram­mat­ic space — which is cur­rent­ly bro­ken by cross-device, cross-brows­er move­ment.

Final­ly, when it comes to automa­tion I expect to see the top 5 per­cent of the mar­ket invest­ing in cus­tom-dri­ven algo­rithms rather than rely­ing on third-par­ty bid man­age­ment tech­nol­o­gy. In the same way that no world class ecom­merce retail­er uses out-of-the-box soft­ware like Shopi­fy (a superb prod­uct for mid-mar­ket), I think adver­tis­ers will start to see how one algo­rithm or tech suite that’s designed and built for them, rather than the mass­es, can rev­o­lu­tion­ize their PPC efforts.

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Zvika Goldstein, VP of Product Management, Kenshoo

In 2016, mar­keters will seek to bet­ter align their mobile app mar­ket­ing strate­gies with key cor­po­rate busi­ness goals by lever­ag­ing audi­ence data and automa­tion to max­i­mize cus­tomer life­time val­ue and exceed rev­enue goals.

The intro­duc­tion of CRM-based audi­ences on Google (cus­tomer match) togeth­er with the progress Google made in RLSA open more oppor­tu­ni­ties for mar­keters to strate­gize around audi­ences more than before. The abil­i­ty to con­nect these audi­ences between the pub­lish­ers will bring new effi­cien­cies and opti­miza­tion capa­bil­i­ties that haven’t been explored pre­vi­ous­ly.

Mar­keters will need stronger automa­tion tools to max­i­mize oppor­tu­ni­ties as a grow­ing num­ber of pub­lish­ers should deliv­er robust results, increas­ing the size and com­plex­i­ty of cam­paign port­fo­lios. In addi­tion, emerg­ing ad types like Dynam­ic Search Ads will bring new oppor­tu­ni­ties to grow adver­tis­ers’ foot­print. On top of which, strong cross-device mea­sure­ment capa­bil­i­ties will inform mobile bid adjust­ments, which will be key for dri­ving suc­cess.

By lever­ag­ing audi­ence data and automa­tion, mar­keters’ app install efforts and con­tin­ued engage­ment there­after can be opti­mized in con­cert to achieve sin­gu­lar mar­ket­ing goals and max­i­mize the life­time val­ue of a cus­tomer.

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Andrew Goodman, President, Page Zero Media

Here are a cou­ple of trends I’m see­ing.

1. ‘Black Box Automa­tion’

Increas­ing­ly, PPC plat­forms offer tempt­ing forms of “black box automa­tion,” from full-on bid opti­miza­tion to “lite ver­sions” such as Enhanced CPC. It pos­es a chal­lenge for PPC man­agers, not because their jobs will become obso­lete, but because they tru­ly need to come to grips with when it’s appro­pri­ate to use an automa­tion tool, and when it is not.

Man­agers will also need to under­stand which of their own analy­sis, strat­e­gy, and hands-on man­age­ment plays nice­ly with these black box­es. I still tend to favor a hybrid approach that uses some of these baked-in tools, and eschews oth­ers.

If you have strong opin­ions about how you’d appor­tion clicks across dif­fer­ent match types and forms of intent, and are like­ly to see bet­ter Qual­i­ty Scores and ROI because of your deep­er under­stand­ing of how your ad groups func­tion, then con­tin­ue being a con­trol freak! Con­ver­sion Opti­miz­er will have you stand­ing idly by, poten­tial­ly, as too many impres­sions and clicks are being mapped to your broad­er key­words. “Just trust us,” right?

2. More Tools to Stream­line the PLA Process

Speak­ing of things that scale, the oth­er big sto­ry in many accounts, in terms of spend, is shop­ping feeds (PLAs). Remem­ber a few years back when there were all these active “com­par­i­son shop­ping engines,” and as a result, “feed spe­cial­ist” com­pa­nies were pop­ping up? It feels like we’re com­ing back to that place again.

Even if you have to con­sid­er only Google, Bing, and Ama­zon, that’s rea­son enough to go out and seek solu­tions to stream­line the process. I’m hop­ing we’ll see a more active and robust ecosys­tem of third-par­ty tool providers in this area. The few that are out there now seem to be on the pricey side, cher­ry-pick­ing the largest accounts. A tier below that, we need to see more solu­tions.

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Pauline Jakober, Founder & CEO, Group Twenty Seven

In 2016, we’ll see a final push to con­vert all land­ing pages and web­sites to mobile-friend­ly ver­sions. We’ve been talk­ing about mobile for years, but tran­si­tion­ing to mobile-friend­ly isn’t easy (or cheap) when you have large, com­plex web­sites that sup­port mul­ti­ple lan­guages.

Many sites start­ed this process in 2015. But hope­ful­ly, in 2016, we can final­ly put this one to bed!

In addi­tion, I pre­dict that video ads will be the next major ad for­mat to dis­play on Google search results pages. We’ve seen a few clues to sup­port this, the main clue being that in 2015, Google migrat­ed True­View ads to the main AdWords inter­face, mak­ing it eas­i­er to man­age these types of cam­paigns and bud­gets.

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Jennifer Johnstone, Associate Director of Biddable Media, Piston

The most notable trends we’re going to see in paid search for large adver­tis­ers in 2016 are more mean­ing­ful insights into the full cus­tomer jour­ney through micro-con­ver­sions, and a bet­ter under­stand­ing of cross-device and online to offline activ­i­ty.

In 2016, adver­tis­ers are going to max­i­mize their paid search efforts to gath­er more insights than just sales and leads. Whether in their accounts or through anoth­er source, adver­tis­ers are going to start track­ing more micro-con­ver­sion actions.

Doing so will give adver­tis­ers the abil­i­ty to bet­ter under­stand which “micro-moments” or sig­nals ulti­mate­ly lead up to a con­ver­sion action. Under­stand­ing which sig­nals are more valu­able will allow them to take a sec­ond look at cam­paigns that may appear to dri­ve poor per­for­mance on the sur­face, when they are actu­al­ly dri­ving many of the micro-moments that assist lat­er in cus­tomer jour­ney.

Cross-device con­ver­sions will also play a big­ger role in how adver­tis­ers man­age their cam­paigns in 2016.

In 2015, we were able to imple­ment user-lev­el track­ing through data that we sup­plied and sub­se­quent­ly pro­duce cross-device report­ing. Now that we’ve com­piled our 2015 cross-device data, it’s time to start ana­lyz­ing to under­stand how the cus­tomer jour­ney takes place with mul­ti­ple ses­sions and across mul­ti­ple devices. Orga­niz­ing this data will allow us to see how touch-points that may appear unre­lat­ed are actu­al­ly con­nect­ed.

Also in 2016, we expect more of this cross-device infor­ma­tion to be shared by our ana­lyt­ics providers instead of rely­ing on our devel­op­ers to make that infer­ence.

The online to offline gap has been bridged quite a bit in 2015 and this will con­tin­ue into 2016. Through many chan­nels, it’s been via bea­cons, coupon down­loads and the like. How­ev­er, Google is also work­ing on under­stand­ing foot traf­fic dri­ven by online media through their new Store Vis­its beta.

Though still ear­ly to see imme­di­ate val­ue, the beta will esti­mate store vis­its dri­ven by our paid search efforts using anony­mous, aggre­gat­ed user data and extrap­o­lat­ing it to a broad­er pop­u­la­tion. With oth­er met­rics fac­tored in man­u­al­ly, like aver­age order val­ue and in-store con­ver­sion rate, we may start to be able to pro­duce more refined assump­tions about the impact our dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing dol­lars have on our brick and mor­tar stores.

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Larry Kim, Founder, WordStream

PPC in 2016 will be increas­ing­ly:

• Peo­ple-cen­tric: Tar­get­ing ads to peo­ple (i.e., demo­graph­ics, behav­iors, inter­ests and actu­al iden­ti­ty) vs. just tar­get­ing search key­words.
• Brand-focused: We need to be more open to using PPC for more than just direct response mar­ket­ing – but also as a valu­able tool to build up your brand and cre­ate new demand for your prod­ucts using the lat­est video, email, and social ads.
• Mobile: There’s still a huge between how peo­ple access the Inter­net and where PPC bud­gets are being spent – this gap will need to close.

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John Lee, Managing Partner, Clix Marketing

Data. Big data, small data, first-par­ty data, third-par­ty data… you name it. Of the many trends to fol­low in 2016, how dig­i­tal adver­tis­ers lever­age data should be at or near the top of the list.

What about data? The myr­i­ad ways adver­tis­ers use first-par­ty data real­ly took hold in 2015. Face­book and Twit­ter per­fect­ed their custom/tailored audi­ence fea­tures. Google added their weight to the fight with the release of Cus­tomer Match in Sep­tem­ber. In 2016, first-par­ty data will take front seat in many adver­tis­ers’ tar­get­ing strate­gies and the ad plat­forms will con­tin­ue to inno­vate how we apply that data.

On the flip-side, the dis­cus­sion of ad block­ing, cook­ie usage and track­ing on the Inter­net will only get loud­er. I just read about a new (free) app by Mozil­la that will block ads, cook­ies and more for iOS devices. Google AdWords just announced their new “smart goals” which count con­ver­sions not with cook­ies, but machine learn­ing instead. Dig­i­tal adver­tis­ers rely on data to opti­mize and scale cam­paigns, the lack there of is a poten­tial trend to keep a very close eye on!

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Melissa Mackey, Search Supervisor, gyro

Up until now, there has been a dichoto­my of search options avail­able to busi­ness­es: tar­get­ing by intent (key­word) with lit­tle to no idea of who the user is; or tar­get­ing by audi­ence (social, remar­ket­ing) with no idea of the intent of the user.

Remar­ket­ing lists for search ads changed all that, and in 2016 we’ll see RLSA become an inte­gral part of the adver­tis­er arse­nal. With the launch of Bing Ads retar­get­ing, adver­tis­ers will be tak­ing advan­tage of RLSA in the major­i­ty of their PPC cam­paigns.

Social PPC will also con­tin­ue to grow with the advent of cus­tom audi­ences on Face­book and Twit­ter, enabling adver­tis­ers to com­mu­ni­cate with their cus­tomers and prospects across mul­ti­ple online touch­points.

Cross-device track­ing and attri­bu­tion will also become more impor­tant. To tru­ly uti­lize RLSA to the fullest, it’s crit­i­cal to track users across devices. Track­ing tech­nol­o­gy will become eas­i­er to imple­ment, and more busi­ness­es will real­ize the ben­e­fits of cross-device track­ing.

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Elizabeth Marsten, Director of Paid Search, CommerceHub

For 2016, smart brands and busi­ness­es should be tak­ing an extra hard look at their attri­bu­tion mod­els across adver­tis­ing types and start get­ting com­fort­able with being flex­i­ble in what is already a rapid­ly chang­ing mar­ket.

It’s real­ly hard to leave last click behind, I get it and this isn’t get­ting solved in 2016 alone. We’ve built so much on last click around rev­enue tar­gets, ad spend and employ­ee incen­tives; but as more plat­forms and adver­tis­ing types enter the mar­ket and we strive to uti­lize those tools to reach indi­vid­ual audi­ences at the right time, we have to also accept that more than one touch point is going to occur and giv­ing those touch points cred­it has to hap­pen.

Start think­ing about CPA tar­gets not just on “PPC” but by chan­nel or plat­form (Google, Bing, Yahoo), PPC ad type (text, shop­ping, remar­ket­ing, dis­play), chan­nel type (social, ver­ti­cal spe­cif­ic search, part­ner net­works), and on an assist basis as well.

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Daniel Morris, Director of Product Marketing, Marin Software

Over the past sev­er­al years, con­sumers have shift­ed towards using mul­ti­ple devices in their buy­ing process along the path to con­ver­sion, cre­at­ing a com­plex, frag­ment­ed envi­ron­ment for adver­tis­ers try­ing to reach cus­tomers with strong pur­chase intent.

As an indus­try, we’ve got­ten bet­ter at tack­ling this prob­lem through deter­min­is­tic and prob­a­bilis­tic match­ing across devices. How­ev­er, with the pro­lif­er­a­tion of con­nect­ed devices (com­mon­ly referred to as the “Inter­net of Things”) the oppor­tu­ni­ties for under­stand­ing cus­tomer needs and inten­tions though sig­nals cap­tured on ever day devices will become increas­ing­ly preva­lent for adver­tis­ers.

Imag­ine a world where we can under­stand when a cus­tomer is in need of a new house­hold clean­ing prod­uct or has an issue with an elec­tron­ics prod­uct based on sig­nals we can ascer­tain from the prod­ucts them­selves. Adver­tis­ers will be able to ful­fill this demand imme­di­ate­ly with­out the cus­tomer lift­ing a fin­ger.

This is the way the indus­try is mov­ing, and the way that con­sumer pur­chase behav­ior is trend­ing – going beyond cross-device mar­ket­ing and think­ing more along the lines of “cross-every­where” in terms of how we under­stand and engage audi­ences.

How­ev­er, along with the ben­e­fits of the growth and advance­ments of con­nect­ed devices come chal­lenges as well. How will adver­tis­ers aggre­gate, ana­lyze and uti­lize the uni­verse of cus­tomer intent sig­nals that are amassed through the IoT? The adver­tis­ers that invest in tech­nol­o­gy focused on solv­ing these prob­lems today will ulti­mate­ly be the ones get­ting a leg up on the com­pe­ti­tion down the road as this type of mar­ket­ing becomes more com­mon­place.

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Christi Olson, Founder, ISEM Consulting

One of the big trends in 2016 will be the con­tin­ued shift from think­ing about paid search in terms of tar­get­ing key­words to think­ing about audi­ence-based mar­ket­ing that focus­es on the con­sumer and con­sumer intent. I see a con­ver­gence in exper­tise and skills of how audi­ences are used across oth­er chan­nels like paid social and pro­gram­mat­ic dis­play com­ing into paid search allow­ing us to devel­op high­ly tar­get­ed cam­paigns that are rel­e­vant to the con­sumers.

An exam­ple of this could be devel­op­ing RLSA cam­paigns to tar­get spe­cif­ic audi­ences reached via paid social cam­paigns and then cus­tomiz­ing the mes­sage and land­ing page for those spe­cif­ic users. It’s think­ing out­side of search and cre­at­ing holis­tic mar­ket­ing pro­grams to meet a spe­cif­ic con­sumer need. The use of audi­ences and email lists will open up a whole new realm of pos­si­bil­i­ties in paid search.

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Diane Pease, Inbound Marketing Manager, Cisco

2016 will be the year of behav­ior tar­get­ed adver­tis­ing. The grow­ing mar­ket­ing focus is cre­at­ing a per­son­al­ized cus­tomer jour­ney.

It’s not B2B or B2C any­more. Mar­ket­ing is about the B2Me expe­ri­ence. It’s impor­tant to reach cus­tomers not only where and when they are search­ing, but pro­vid­ing them with a per­son­al expe­ri­ence.

The growth of data man­age­ment plat­forms such as BlueKai are giv­ing com­pa­nies the abil­i­ty to do just that. It cre­ates the abil­i­ty to get in-depth knowl­edge of cur­rent cus­tomer online attrib­ut­es and behav­iors. This in turn helps deter­mine poten­tial audi­ences through looka­like mod­el­ing.

DMPs also allow the abil­i­ty to send con­sis­tent mes­sag­ing to all mar­ket­ing chan­nels. Know­ing your customer’s online behav­ior is the key to being suc­cess­ful in the com­ing year.

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Marc Poirier, CEO & Co-Founder, Acquisio

Con­sid­er­ing the lim­it­ed com­mer­cial suc­cess of the Win­dows Phone, Bing’s short term suc­cess in mobile great­ly depends on their abil­i­ty to replace Google as the default search engine in the iPhone’s Safari brows­er. There are rumors that the agree­ment between Apple and Google could end short­ly, if this is true, Microsoft and Apple could poten­tial­ly come to an agree­ment which would change the land­scape of search and put Bing in posi­tion to play a very mean­ing­ful role in mobile search for years to come.

In order to be ready for this poten­tial­ly dra­mat­ic change, which could eas­i­ly mean a 15 to 25 per­cent drop in paid search traf­fic for those who only use AdWords, mar­keters will need to improve their abil­i­ty to work with Google AdWords and Bing Ads at the same time, not only when it’s time to cre­ate new assets, but also on a day-to-day basis, as they will need to make sure that both accounts are kept in sync, and that they can allo­cate mon­ey effec­tive­ly where it will be best uti­lized.

This will require increased dis­ci­pline from mar­keters, and smart usage of tech­nol­o­gy. Some of the tools that are avail­able are the Bing Ads “Import from Google AdWords” tool, also some of the third par­ty bid man­age­ment plat­forms now have the abil­i­ty to keep Bing Ads and AdWords accounts “in-sync” to avoid hav­ing to do every­thing twice.

Doing this not only pre­vents a poten­tial loss of sales, but also allows mar­keters to allo­cate their mon­ey more intel­li­gent­ly to the best per­form­ing cam­paigns, regard­less of what ad plat­form they reside on.

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Lisa Raehsler, Founder, Big Click Co.

Paid search and PPC is mov­ing away from the key­word being king.

We have come to learn key­word search­es are only one step on the con­ver­sion path. Mul­ti­ple touch­points con­tribute to the suc­cess of a most busi­ness­es or brands.

This makes reach­ing the right audi­ence in the right moment more about online behav­ior than a sim­ple key­word search.

Adver­tis­ers are begin­ning to embrace this con­cept and are see­ing great results.

In 2016, PPC will con­tin­ue to evolve into a behav­ioral cus­tomer jour­ney where strate­gies and cam­paigns will be devel­oped around the sales fun­nel and mul­ti­ple touch­points. Inte­gra­tion across devices will be crit­i­cal to growth: mobile, smart homes, smart TVs, wear­ables, app search, and vir­tu­al assis­tants like Ama­zon Echo.

Wher­ev­er there is a ques­tion, prob­lem to solve, or prod­uct need will be an oppor­tu­ni­ty to spon­sor those results and be present to the con­sumer at the right moment.

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Zack Schroll, Director of Marketing, Hanapin Marketing

If you’re respon­si­ble for adver­tis­ing bud­gets and not tak­ing the nec­es­sary steps to address the cre­ation of a per­son­al­ized user expe­ri­ence based on data, you are in for a long year. 2016 will be the year that smart busi­ness­es learn to lever­age all of their data more strate­gi­cal­ly, to cre­ate high val­ue tar­get audi­ences and cus­tomized mes­sag­ing. Those that do so suc­cess­ful­ly will reap the ben­e­fits to their bot­tom line, and oth­ers will try and play catch up.

Tra­di­tion­al PPC or paid search will no longer sit in a silo. Busi­ness­es will roll Pro­gram­mat­ic dis­play into their PPC ecosys­tem. Com­bin­ing the vast amount of data from first par­ty data sources, social, search, and DMPs will allow busi­ness­es to learn, more than ever, about who their audi­ences tru­ly are. Brands will then be able to lever­age this data to dynam­i­cal­ly cre­ate and serve ads based on indi­vid­ual char­ac­ter­is­tics at scale.

Our recent­ly released annu­al State of PPC report also found that both adver­tis­ers at agen­cies and brands agree social adver­tis­ing and con­ver­sion rate opti­miza­tion (now a sta­ple for our indus­try) are con­sid­ered the two most impor­tant aspects of PPC for 2016. As con­sumer behav­iors con­tin­ue to shift, desk­top impres­sions shrink, and CPC’s rise, brands must tap into addi­tion­al chan­nels such as social and lever­age smarter tar­get­ing options being rolled out by Google and Bing, to stay rel­e­vant.

The indus­try con­tin­ues to move fast; suc­cess­ful brands will need to find the right part­ners to help them nav­i­gate all the changes and new tech­nolo­gies avail­able.

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David Szetela, VP of Search Marketing Operations, Bruce Clay Inc.

Last year I pre­dict­ed that in 2015 mobile search­es would out­num­ber search­es from any oth­er device. I also pre­dict­ed that many adver­tis­ers would get more impres­sions and clicks from dis­play adver­tis­ing com­pared to search adver­tis­ing.

The first pre­dic­tion was right on the mon­ey; Google recent­ly announced that mobile search­es have out­num­bered non-mobile ones. In 2016 we’ll see even more growth of mobile’s share. Some advice for adver­tis­ers:

• Local adver­tis­ers should add key­words that include the ubiq­ui­tous “near me.”
• Com­pa­nies of all sizes will max­i­mize calls by mak­ing sure that call cen­ters are open 24/7. At least as impor­tant: oper­a­tors should be ful­ly trained to max­i­mize qual­i­ty leads.
• Even if you need to divert resources and spend extra time and mon­ey, cre­ate a site that is a delight to use by mobile vis­i­tors. Most respon­sive sites aren’t mobile-friend­ly enough to max­i­mize calls and leads.
• Cre­ate cus­tomized ads for mobile. Fre­quent­ly long head­lines and descrip­tion lines are trun­cat­ed and unread­able. Tweak the designs of your image ads, too.
• Make sure you’re using all ad exten­sions pos­si­ble – includ­ing the rel­a­tive­ly-new struc­tured snip­pets. You can be one of only two ads at the top of the mobile SERPs!

Regard­ing dis­play ads: adver­tis­er adop­tion is still lag­ging. Adver­tis­ers are wary about los­ing mon­ey due to alleged­ly inher­ent poor-qual­i­ty traf­fic – a crit­i­cism the GDN deserved when the only tar­get­ing method depend­ed on impre­cise key­words.

Fast for­ward to recent years, and many adver­tis­ers are win­ning with the GDN using pow­er­ful tar­get­ing meth­ods that let them zero in on hyper-tar­get­ed cus­tomer seg­ments and dis­play hyper-per­ti­nent ads.

In 2016, learn and employ tar­get­ing GDN ads using “In-mar­ket audi­ences” and “Cus­tom affin­i­ty audi­ences.”

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Katy Tonkin, VP of Digital Strategy, Point It

2015 was (final­ly) the year of mobile and mobile will con­tin­ue to be a major cor­ner­stone in 2016. Adver­tis­ers are see­ing impres­sion vol­umes on desk­top and tablets flat or even declin­ing.

On top of that, desk­top and tablet CPCs on brand and trade­marked terms are increas­ing at a high­er rate than ever before. In order to main­tain growth, adver­tis­ers must incor­po­rate mobile into their strate­gies.

2016 will also be the year where we start to see the end of mobile as just an engage­ment or aware­ness tac­tic and not a con­ver­sion tac­tic. User adop­tion, apps, mobile pay­ments, and cross-device track­ing capa­bil­i­ties all are con­tribut­ing to the via­bil­i­ty and val­ue of mobile traf­fic.

Social and dis­play adver­tis­ing long ago out­paced the search engines in audi­ence tar­get­ing func­tion­al­i­ty and usabil­i­ty. And in 2016, invest­ment and growth in social adver­tis­ing is list­ed as one of the most impor­tant mar­ket­ing ini­tia­tives for adver­tis­ers.

Many sur­veys also show that adver­tis­ers plan to increase their Face­book spend at either the same per­cent­age or more than what they spend on Google AdWords. Why? Adver­tis­ers have so much more con­trol of their reach and the mes­sage through social.

Last­ly, anoth­er hot­ly debat­ed trend to watch in PPC cir­cles the is the shift away from key­word tar­get­ing to audi­ence or per­sona tar­get­ing. Expect to see Google and Bing con­tin­ue to rapid­ly beta and main­stream fea­tures that allow adver­tis­ers to use first-par­ty data for more sophis­ti­cat­ed tar­get­ing, bid­ding, and mes­sag­ing.

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Frederick Vallaeys, CEO and Cofounder, Optmyzr

Ads cre­at­ed from struc­tured data will con­tin­ue to get more impor­tant in 2016. Shop­ping ads (which are auto­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­at­ed from the struc­tured data in a prod­uct feed) already account for more than 1 in 3 clicks for retail­ers and these types of ads will con­tin­ue to take away clicks from more gener­ic search ads in 2016. Google will also launch new spe­cial­ty ad for­mats to expand on their cur­rent offer­ings which already include mort­gage ads, home ser­vice ads, and hotel ads.

Video ads will see sig­nif­i­cant momen­tum and more inno­v­a­tive ad for­mats. While video ads have long pro­vid­ed much low­er CPCs than tra­di­tion­al search ads, they have been some­what dif­fi­cult to man­age but now that Google has inte­grat­ed their True­View ad for­mats more deeply into AdWords, they will see larg­er adop­tion.

This will dri­ve up CPCs but because there is so much inven­to­ry it will lim­it the increase and still make them a rel­a­tive­ly good buy. Google will also intro­duce new ways to place ads along­side or inside videos that will pro­vide bet­ter tar­get­ing and improved con­ver­sion rates, fur­ther mak­ing video a great area for adver­tis­ers to expand into in 2016.

Now that we have Cus­tomer Match in AdWords, it’s clear Google is will­ing to fol­low the lead­ers in social when it comes to the tar­get­ing options they pro­vide. Look for more ways to tar­get users behav­ioral­ly, demo­graph­i­cal­ly, psy­cho­graph­i­cal­ly, even when they are on the Google search results pages. This will pro­vide a great oppor­tu­ni­ty to tar­get very nar­row­ly to exact­ly the right types of users who not only searched for your key­words but who also fit the typ­i­cal pro­file of your typ­i­cal cus­tomer.

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Purna Virji, Senior Bing Ads Client Development & Training Manager, Microsoft

I believe that Voice Search is going to be some­thing adver­tis­ers have to increas­ing­ly pay atten­tion to in 2016. Giv­en the increas­ing adop­tion of dig­i­tal per­son­al assis­tants like Cor­tana or Siri across all ages groups and demos, voice search queries could begin to have an effect on adver­tis­ers and how they approach mobile PPC.

Already Bing’s research is show­ing that voice search queries tend to be more ques­tion-based and con­sist of longer phras­es. What’s inter­est­ing is that the type of ques­tion posed can reveal the intent to pur­chase. For exam­ple, “what is home depot” vs. “where is the clos­est home depot”, with the lat­ter hav­ing a high­er pur­chase intent. Adver­tis­ers can then adjust their bids based on intent and ensure they’re cap­tur­ing this mobile audi­ence. Voice search is going to be a trend PPC mar­keters would ben­e­fit by fol­low­ing.

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The experts have had their say. Now it’s your turn. What do you think will be the key PPC trends in 2015? Share your thoughts in the com­ments.