2017 has almost come to a close and what a year it has been. With this, it is that time of year to start looking to a new fresh year, and prepare for what it shall bring. Staying on top of the trends there are in PPC as an advertiser is a good way to make sure you are utilizing all of the features of PPC and preparing yourself for changes when and if they come. Here are the main PPC trends to look out for in 2018.
 
 

Machine Learning Testing

Traditionally, how PPC advertisers and publishers test the performance of adverts is through A/B testing. This tends to involve parallel testing, changing one variable at a time. The problem with this, though, is that it takes a lot of time to do testing and get results that can produce accurate outcomes as to whether the A or B test produced the best results.
2017 has seen a rise in artificial intelligence testing. This takes advantage of machine learning, which is the ability for a machine to automatically test and learn what the best variations are for optimum performance, remember and continually improve upon it. An example of this in PPC is with Ezoic, which produces significantly more revenue for publishers than using Google Adsense by itself.
We can be sure there will be more machine learning in PPC in 2018, considering the fact that the more money publishers make, the more money Google effectively makes.
 
 

Voice Search

Although voice search has been around for quite some time, it has only been in the last few years that we have seen a rise in the home smart speakers, as well as artificial intelligence, such as Google Assistant, Bixby, Siri and Amazon Echo.
The vast majority of searches on search engines are still done via typing onto a keyboard. However, it is becoming easier and easier to search using your voice. For this reason, there is likely to be a rise in voice search in 2018, which should be taken into consideration by advertisers when choosing keywords (as the way you type can sometimes be different to the way you speak).
 
 

Google Shopping

Around the start of the year, Google was fined a heavy 2.4 billion euros for unfairly favoring Google Shopping results in their search, considering that Google gains commission on such sponsored search results. The great thing about this, for advertisers, is that the PPC sector to Google will be much more fairer, potentially with better results coming in. But, on the contrary, Google Shopping may prove to be less effective in gaining sales than it was before, in the past.
2018 should be a year of fairer competition on Google and a better user experience for the web user. Google Shopping sponsored results should no longer have an unfair advantage, enabling more contextual results to appear first to the advertiser.