There are only a few days left of 2016 and what a year it has been. Putting advertising aside, a lot has happened this year be it for the better or worse. Bringing PPC advertising back into the topic of conversation, we have seen some changes become adopted into PPC which have made quite a large impact to PPC advertising as a whole. With this, here are the main changes we saw implemented into Google AdWords over the last year with a prediction for 2017.

#1 Removal of Right Hand Side Adverts

A shock came to the PPC world in February as Google removed the whole right hand sidebar which was, before, filled with search adverts. Instead, Google felt, to improve the user experience of their search engine, it was better to remove the right hand side bar and add an extra space above organic search results bringing the grand total of paid search results above organic results to four.

At first, this seemed quite a strange move to make with many people feeling PPC would never be the same again. However, since February, the change has, on the whole, been positive. Yes, it does mean less adverts are going to be displayed at once on Google’s search engine. However, advertisers have seen CTR increases which will please the vast majority out there.

#2 Introduction of Expanded Text PPC Ads

In a bid to improve the click through rate of search adverts, Google decided to implement expanded text adverts, which allowed PPC advertisers a much larger character field for the description, increasing from 30 to 80 characters. On the whole, this was a welcome change which has seen many advertiser campaign’s click through rates increase considerably.

What will 2017 Bring?

To answer quite frankly, nobody really knows. Compared to 2015, the amount of changes Google made to AdWords in 2016 was ridiculous. However, it has worked and improved the experience for both web users and advertisers alike.

For this reason, I will not be surprised to see if we see Google try out some new features in 2017 to, again, improve PPC. For example, I can see a general trend of PPC becoming more contextual and contextual as the internet giant gathers more data about us. In the old days, the adverts on a website would be displayed contextually and link to the content it was near. However, to some extent, this is not needed anymore considering the fact that Google knows enough already about our daily habits to pick the right advert that we are most likely to click on.

Every year, I do look at technological improvements and PPC as a bit of a ‘1984’ situation (if you have read George Orwell’s book). However, not a bad ‘1984’ but a good one. Information is what makes life easier and Google is merely going to continue using information about ourselves to make life that bit easier and nicer for us.