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2 Google Ads Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2021

Let’s face it: getting organic traffic to your website is hard. There’s tons of competition for keywords, social media is now a pay-to-play space, and voice search is throwing a wrench in everything SEO-related.

If you want to get more leads and sales, you’re going to have to do some pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. And with a whopping 63,000 searches done per second, Google is the place to do it. In fact:

• Google has 90.46% of the search engine market share worldwide.
• 15% of all searches have never been searched before on Google.
• Google has a market value of $739 billion.
• An average person conducts 3-4 searches every single day.

Google is constantly adding to and upgrading its massive suite of products, which makes it hard for the typical advertiser to keep up with what’s available to them. That’s why we’ve rounded up the six biggest Google Ads trends for 2021 to help you plan the right marketing campaigns for your business this year.

Trend #1: Google Ads Smart Bidding

In recent years, Google has invested heavily in artificial intelligence (AI), and Smart Bidding is one of the many results of that investment. Google’s definition is:

Smart Bidding is a subset of automated bid strategies that use machine learning to optimize for conversions or conversion value in each and every auction — a feature known as ‘auction-time bidding.’

Simply put, it takes the guesswork out of bidding for Google Ads. Google’s AI system uses machine learning to automatically optimize for conversions in each auction. You tell Google what your advertising goal is and Smart Bidding figures out how to get it done within your budget.

Smart Bidding works for a number of PPC goals, including:

• Target CPA: Generate new leads and customers for your desired cost per acquisition.
• Target ROAS: Get the best return on investment (ROI) on your spend.
• Maximize Conversions: Increase your conversion rate.

Smart Bidding allows you to use many different signals for your bid optimization, some of which are unique to the system and unavailable with manual bidding. Here are just a few of the signals you can choose from:

• Location intent: Where a user intends to go versus their physical location. For example, if someone is researching travel.
• Weekday and time of day: Local businesses can target customers during certain times with relevant information or offers.
• Remarketing list: Ads can be optimized based on when users last interacted with products and what those interactions were.
• Ad characteristics: If you have multiple versions of an ad, Google can bid on the ones that are most likely to convert.
• Interface language: Bids can be adjusted for the language with which a user is searching.

Trend #2: Google Discovery Ads

Google rolled out Discover, its personalized mobile newsfeed, in late 2018. The goal of the feed is to surface relevant content to users even when they’re not searching.

Discover’s content is arranged as cards under topics to explore and, depending on a user’s interests, includes different types like video, recipes, news articles and blog posts. Because the focus of the content is relevancy, it doesn’t always give you the newest content — typically quality evergreen content is featured.

Google Discover is available via the Google mobile app and by visiting Google.com on a mobile browser. Users can control what shows up in the feed, which leads to a more personalized experience.

Earlier this year, Google introduced Discovery Ads, which are native ads that show up in multiple Google feed environments.

Similar to Display Ads or YouTube ads, Discovery Ads must be visually engaging and mobile-friendly so that they feel native to the feeds they are displayed on. Google uses machine learning to optimize ad placement based on users’ search history, feed engagement and other factors to deliver them to the most interested potential customers.